Film Review by Tom Pearson:
Central Station

This film is not about Central do Brasil, the main train station in Rio 
de Janeiro, even though the opening scenes are set under its arched roof. 
Nor is it directly about Rio's dispossessed street kids, though they too 
are there in the station, and we are early on given a gruesome example of 
their plight.

Instead, the station becomes a metaphor for the mass movement of people and 
their enforced indifference to each other; the homeless children the most 
graphic example of Brazilian society being torn apart by greed, crime, 
corruption and poverty.

This is given more emphasis in the way photographer Walter Carvalho has 
filmed the station. The arriving and departing trains, for example, are 
sleek and gleaming, like crosses and candelabrum drenched with light in a 
sun-filled church.

To make ends meet, Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), a retired school teacher, 
sets up a table each day in Central do Brasil to write letters for the 
illiterate workers travelling to work from Rio's impoverished suburbs. One 
dollar per letter, another dollar to mail it.

As the camera caresses their faces they pour out their stories: "My 
darling, my heart belongs to you", "Have you ever been alone in the 
world?". Some are seeking lost family members, like nine-year-old Josue 
(Vinicius de Oliveira), who, with his mother, wants to send a letter to the 
father he's never met.

Each night Dora and her friend and neighbour Irene (Marilia Pera), in their 
appartment block, read the letters and argue over which ones to send and 
which will be thrown in the rubbish. In the case of a stand-off, the letter 
is put in a drawer, into "purgatory".

Dora and Irene live in a kind of purgatory themselves. Alone and taking 
comfort from the experiences of others, Montenegro and Pera convey a 
friendship with knowing looks that speak of shared aspirations and dashed 
hopes.

Montenegro is especially good; an extraordinary actress who can express 
profound disappointment with a slight twist of her mouth, or doubting 
cynicism with a raised eyebrow.

Josue, unlike most of the thousands of other street kids, becomes homeless 
by accident — his mother is knocked down by a bus and killed. When it 
comes to the notice of the ruthless security guards that he's living in the 
station, Dora reluctantly intervenes and takes him home with her.

But Josue is determined to go to his father. "Do you know where he lives?", 
asks Dora, and answers her own question. "Thousands of miles away — on 
another planet."

In fact he lives in the remote and arid northeast, and while it is not 
another planet, compared to Rio it is like another country, a place where 
the roots of Brazil's culture still run deep.

The barrier Dora has erected to protect herself from the cruel realities of 
daily life is broken down by Josue and, despite his protests, she decides 
to go with him on his journey.

There is much humour in Central Station, mostly through ironic 
observation.

An evangelist truck driver who gives them a ride, tells a shop keeper where 
he's made a delivery, "The young people are there in the churches, a whole 
generation raised on the values of Christ", as Josue, out of sight in the 
next aisle, stuffs his pockets with food from the shop's shelves.

For a while the truck driver, Dora and Josue become a family, an obvious 
sort of symbolism that works in a film like this because it is true to its 
underlying cultural imperative.

In Hollywood this would be seen as an ideal vehicle for a road movie about 
a personal search for the meaning of existence and the eventual bonding 
together of the nuclear family.

But the nuclear family — insular, narrow, closed off — is a world turned 
on its head to most cultures, as is demonstrated in Central Station 
where the goal of the journey is to seek out the means to unite the family 
as a unifying social force.

At one stage Dora and Josue catch a ride with a group on a pilgrimage who 
are going to worship in a village near to where Josue's father is supposed 
to live.

Exhausted, hungry and broke, Dora exclaims: "I have to find a truck out of 
here to get off this Godforsaken pilgrimage."

It is part of the telling insight of this film that she continues on, 
driven by social forces she cannot completely comprehend, but at the same 
time understanding the necessity of completing the journey.