Elite Squad

by Karen Backstein

“You may think that what I do is inhuman, but as long as the dealers have guns, we have no choice,” intones the captain of a select group of police officers in José Padilha's Elite Squad ( Tropa de Elite). This address to the viewer by the film's lead character lays out the logic for the action to come, and also alerts us to the fact that what we see will be heavily focused through one man's perspective. Will we accept his reasoning or not? With this question at the heart of Padilha's divisive work, I wouldn't be surprised if it one day became the text of choice in cinema studies classes for teaching the ramifications of point of view—and the difficulty of determining exactly how audiences will identify with the characters and the situations that play out onscreen.

Indeed, outside of the classroom, Elite Squad has done just that, sparking both controversy and fascination in Brazil and around the world. On the one hand, it won the Golden Bear Award in Berlin, bestowed by a panel headed by long-time leftist cinéaste Costa-Gavras, while triumphing also in Mexico’s Ariel Awards and receiving a plethora of other honors in Brazil. On the other hand, the mainstream industry journal Variety—hardly known for its radical politics—infuriated Padilha by using the dreaded “F” word to describe Elite Squad: “Fascist.” In Brazil, even before the film’s release, the buzz was so strong that when pirated copies surfaced prior to the opening, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of bootlegs were snapped up. Even so, it became the most-seen Brazilian film during its theatrical release. (Padilha later made some alternations to the final cut.)

How could a film stir such conflicting emotions—and from exactly the opposite sources where one might expect them? The answer partly lies in how you relate to the central character: Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), leader of a BOPE (Special Police Operation Battalion) troop in Rio that primarily handles drug cases in the city’s poor shantytowns, where, until recently, top dealers have wielded almost unrivaled power. He’s burned out and anxious to retire to a less pressure-filled position so he can spend time with his wife and new baby. Only one thing stands in his way: he has to find his replacement first, and that’s no simple matter. The training, dramatized in extensive detail, is brutal and dehumanizing, and the possibilities dwindle as recruit after traumatized recruit drops out. But two young men stand out: the middle-class, white, hotheaded Neto (Caio Junqueira) and an idealistic black law student from a more impoverished background, André Matias (André Ramiro). Adding to tension in the city and within the BOPE is the Pope’s upcoming visit to Rio. The city’s honchos expect the visit to go off without a hitch, in spite of the fact that the Pontiff has chosen to stay at the Bishop’s house right at the foot of a favela. As a result, the police are on a mission to “clean up” the area.

It’s a setting familiar to anyone who has seen City of God (2002), and one increasingly used to represent Brazil in the cinema—at least to the outside world. (The lighter romantic comedies, often set in Rio’s more upscale districts, which occasionally appear in Brazilian film festivals here, rarely get U.S. theatrical release. Neither do the many music-related documentaries and features.) Falling into the familiar gangster genre, but with an exotic flavor, these movies are easily accessible to foreign audiences: Americans recognize most of the elements in the basic narrative, but enjoy the foreign details that make it fresh. And Elite Squad, edited by Daniel Rezende, who also cut City of God, pulsates with energy right from the start. It opens like gangbusters, with a scene cross-cutting between a huge baile funk (outdoor dance party) at the favela and the cops quietly invading like soldiers on a mission. Pulsing music from the dance explodes on the soundtrack, running through almost the entire montage. (As is almost always the case in Brazilian films, the score is fantastic.) The tension ratchets up as war eventually breaks out over the twisting, labyrinthinefavela landscape. It’s stunning, drawing the audience in instantly.

Crucially, Nascimento’s narration runs through the work, guiding us and providing his perspective on everything that happens. And that voice-over is central to the controversy surrounding Elite Squad: critics who feel that the audience is positioned to embrace Nascimento’s view see the film negatively, while those who agree with Padilha that the audience is meant to question, even reject, the Captain’s actions have a more sympathetic perception of the work. Padilha has claimed that the scenes of torture should make an audience think about the social processes that lead someone to such behavior, and in the film, Nascimento asserts that the only options open to a police officer today are to become corrupt, shut up, or go to war—an opinion Padilha echoed in an interview on the Roda Viva website. The director then goes on to say that, “War is Captain Nascimento’s choice. But this doesn’t mean that I agree with this option or with the two others.” He also noted that Elite Squad could be viewed as the flip side of his documentary Bus 174 (2002), which examined the life of bus hijacker Sandro Nascimento—with whom Elite Squad’s captain shares a last name.

Setting aside for a moment the quandary that if only three options are open to the police officer and Padilha doesn’t agree with any of them, we’ve hit a total dead end, what does the actual film itself—its camerawork, narrative, and structure—say about Captain Nascimento? It is true that simply because a character is a narrator, he needn’t be a dependable one or appealing one; other facets of the work can contradict and complicate the protagonist’s words, including his own actions. Does that happen here? Is distance maintained? I would suggest that the answer must be “no,” for various reasons. First, we have the other police officers who serve as contrasts to Nascimento: they all embody the “other choices” Padilha offers—corruption, shutting up, and giving up. Through the eyes of the new, dewier-eyed recruits, we see how actual good police work is stymied not only by higher-ups more interested in getting their cut of the profits than in enforcing the law, but by ordinary cops eager for their share. The system plays out on screen in something that would seem almost Keystone Kop-ish if their behavior didn’t have such serious repercussions. Nascimento, for all his violence, has a code that he, and the rest of his fellow BOPE officers, live by. They do not accept bribes. Their own transgressions are motivated, in their minds, by the “greater good”: getting rid of the dealers whose activities harm the law-abiding favelados who simply want to go about their business. It may be a flawed morality—it isn’t easy watching the squad beat suspects, and cover their faces in plastic bags until they’re bloody and gasping for breath—but it is still the only morality demonstrated by anyone in the film.

Second, in addition to actor Wagner Moura’s almost ever-present voice, the cinematography studies his face to capture his emotional responses, and follows his actions in and out of work. We learn his reasoning, see his remorse in regard to one particular decision he’s made, and watch as he falls victim to panic attacks that require gulpfuls of medicine. His is the only family presented in any depth, outside of one grieving mother whose son, a low-level lookout, died because Nascimento forced him to inform on the dealers.

For me, however, what turns the film most sympathetic to Nascimento is the presentation of a different protagonist: the recruit Matias. Matias’s journey is just as important as Nascimento’s and every bit as vital in shaping audience attitudes. For one, he is black and poor, and therefore most linked to the favela where most of the violence occurs: his acceptance of the special force’s action carries extra weight. Second, he’s constantly torn between his requirements as a would-be BOPE officer and his studies in the law school, where he hides his life as a cop from his fellow students. At the university where Foucault is the standard text, leftist ideas prevail, the police are considered evil, and do-gooding activities in the slum are encouraged. But those students are mostly white, and many smoke pot, sniff cocaine, and even deal on campus. They’re straw men who range from the dangerously innocent to just plain dangerous, vulnerable to Matias’s critique that they can’t see what’s really going on from their nice upscale apartments. Matias has a choice to make, and it is his final decision that, to me, most validates Nascimento’s path as the correct one within the narrative—or, if not exactly correct, the only one possible under the circumstances. Perhaps, in the end, that is why Variety called the film fascist: in justifying the worst excesses as necessary to maintain order, it veers perilously close to that ideology.

Ultimately, how a spectator sees this film will depend on where he or she stands to begin with. A look at various Web sites, such as IMDB, where audiences can comment, reveals that many Brazilians, fed up with the violence in the favelas, share Nascimento’s perspective. Other recent events may affect attitudes also: a “militia” of drug-dealing cops had to turn themselves in after being accused of kidnapping and torturing a group of journalists who were in the favela undercover to report on the slum’s underground economy. Will the millions of Brazilians who saw the film think of the “incorruptible” Captain Nascimento as a viable alternative?

The issues explored in Elite Squad are part of a larger debate—one that the film may eventually influence.

Karen Backstein has taught film studies at several universities in the New York City Area.

To buy Elite Squad click here .

Cineaste,Vol.XXXIII No.4 2008

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