“PACIFIED” REVIEW | TRIBECA 2020

        [Note: This film is being screened as part of the Viewpoints section of Tribeca 2020]      

        “Sicilian pizza – it’s gonna be fucking good.” So says the middle-aged former crime boss Jaca, having just returned to his Rio de Janeiro favela, the shantytown realm of poverty over which he ruled before spending nearly fifteen years in prison. “It’s product and service,” he explains, laying out his plan to open a legit pizzeria, “same as dealing. It’ll be steady income for us.” This is a belated response to the contemplation of destiny suggested within the movie’s opening shot which lovingly frames the face of a teenaged girl looking out her window as she considers the circumstances of her social landscape. Her father Jaca’s modest goal of honest entrepreneurial prosperity is a sober realization of self in director Paxton Winters’s “Pacified” – a motion picture that throughout its portrayal of institutionalized corruption and violence, persists in cherishing the endeavors of its characters and the place they call home.

        That teenaged girl is Tati (Cassia Gil), just one of an entire community curious as to whether Jaca (Bukassa Kabengele) will attempt to regain the power assumed by a former underling in his absence. Like any municipality in which organized crime exists as a shadow state, the question carries major implications for the future of the favela’s residents. Not so much for the Brazilian government, which has an over-the-table partnership with organized crime as part of its temporary policy called Pacification, in which local gangsters work as outsourced security in these poor neighborhoods, enabling relative peace and order while Rio is hosting the Olympics. With a distant view of the stadium, the young Tati watches fireworks go off at the closing ceremony of the games, which she, being poor, had no access to. “She better start learning to please those hood rats,” opines a female friend of her mother regarding Tati’s future.

        Now that the Olympics are over, so is Pacification. But Jaca’s indulgence in the simple pleasures of being free from incarceration are palpable as he holds a homemade cup of coffee, sitting back on his couch, knowing he has the opportunity to put to good use not just a bundle of money he had hidden, but above all, his time. “You do that shit in the house?” he asks about the personal drug use of his brother who’s a trafficker working for the favela’s new boss. His brother’s retort, “That shit built this house,” underscores precisely the cycle of lives beholden to circumstance that Jaca is trying to break free of.

        Not that he approaches this challenge from a place of holier-than-thou morality. What’s beautiful about Jaca’s shift in psychology is his acceptance of both the way things are, and his place within that framework. It’s a notion of plain accountability for what he himself can do. That is why there is no sense of hypocrisy when, eventually finding himself between a rock and a hard place, he resorts to pedestrian crime so as to preserve the safety of a loved one. There is an unburdened manner of practicality behind all he does. As with presidential elections, the luxury to chose the ideal is often absent, but one can usually chose to do the least harm. What’s miraculous about Jaca is that, allowed the chance to choose peace, he does so; not just as a resolution that is immediate yet transitory, but as a larger commitment to himself, despite the inhospitable terrain around him.

        He is, however, but one person atop an immoveable mountain; a conundrum of free will verses preordination most breathtakingly realized in what is perhaps the best drone shot I have ever seen in a motion picture. Usually not implemented as an artistic choice of particular purpose, thanks to the democratization of the necessary technology, filmmakers tend to use drone shots simply because they can, presuming that its mere existence is impressive, but neglectful of the notion that it should also mean something. “Why this shot?” is a question some filmmakers seem to not ask themselves enough.

        “Pacified” is quite different. Jaca carries a refrigerator on his back while precariously approaching a long and fairly steep public stairway leading upward in the direction of his favela. The camera frames the beginning of his ascent, then rises above him, revealing the stairway to be the first of many. The beauty of this shot’s poignancy unfolds as the camera ascends one long stairway after another through the shanties piled alongside them, finally stopping on the property Jaca is converting into his pizzeria, of which carrying the refrigerator all that way on his back is but a first step. It’s a salt-of-the-earth embodiment of the faith and goodwill which the famous statue of gargantuan proportions depicting an open-armed Christ only implies atop another, altogether quite different, hill.

        Whether that particular shot, close-ups of the human face, the folds of a thin blanket hung in a home’s makeshift doorway waving gently in the air blown by a cool breeze, or girls applying lipstick in the mirror cutting seamlessly to them twerking to music played on a public porch converted into an outdoor club among the favela’s beautifully grotesque architecture, this is a canvas full of texture. Writer/director Winters, director of photography Laura Merians, editor Aylin Tinel, and their cast incarnate a rich ecosystem of quotidian culture, the specificity of which these people are tied to.

        The presence of the Olympics is part and parcel to the social labyrinth in which Brazilian law enforcement and organized crime exist, which the people must navigate by whatever means necessary. Young thugs with machine guns patrolling the streets in t-shirts and sneakers is quite a juxtaposition to the usual cinematic notions of organized crime which have been given a legendary aura of respectability in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” trilogy (1972 / 1974 / 1990), the romanticism of which is also refuted by Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah” (2008). That near-docudrama’s heartbreaking portrayal of organized crime in modern Naples is much more akin to “Pacified”‘s self-mutilating hamster wheel of societal failures, and even more so in style than is “City of God” (2002) by Fernando Meirelles which “Pacified” may be more immediately compared to given its shared setting of the slums of Rio, but whose tone is more sensationalized than the realism of Winters’s movie.

        Everyone in Jaca’s community – from kids shoplifting, to men high jacking trucks of electronic goods – is forced to survive by choices running the gamut of one’s moral compass, which is often not difficult given the alternatives. But many living ostensibly higher class, by-the-book lives confront the same predicaments. When an armed friend, patrolling the streets with other gangsters, talks smack to police on his walkie-talkie, saying that the cops are broke just like people of the favela, an apprehensive Jaca warns him, “They’re the state and they’ll always make you pay in the end.” It’s a society, not unlike pre-World War II Sicily, that is cannibalized from the top and the bottom.

        But having suffered for the choices made in his past, and with the modest means to try something else, Jaca also understands that you can spin the life of organized crime however you want and it won’t amount to much more than a psychosis. Think about Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990), with its murder, exploitation, and terror existing as a shadow community, the paranoia inherent in the life of its mafiosi, just to live in a middle class house on Long Island which they could have done working a nine-to-five. All so as to not feel like a sucker in a daily rat race – one which, subservient as it may seem to some, sure beats trying to open a pizzeria in a third-world shantytown.

        Walking with your chin up and shoulders back is not exclusively the purview of those who don’t have the mettle to get by honestly in the richest of first-world nations, choosing to use the threat of violence to scam a system that is comparatively bountiful to begin with. Scorsese’s Tommy DeVito and Billy Batts were cogs in a different system of their own making, unable or unwilling to learn from the previous hundred schmucks who were taken out before them or the next hundred who are bumped off after.

        Jaca, who has far less of a level playing field than did the young and impressionable Henry Hill, will be damned if he allows himself to be baited into a life of further imprisonment, be it state-sanctioned or any other. Claiming to have learned how to make decent pasta from Sicilians while in prison, he’ll start small: pizza and beer. “I like cooking because it’s the only thing I’m good at that doesn’t hurt anyone,” he says. “I need peace.”