“Pixote” is not only the name of this film, but the name of the lead character, a boy of eleven. “Pixote” means approximately “Pee Wee” of “Little Bastard,” both appropriate for the little protagonist in this story. Pixote was one of the three million street children without families living in the cities of Brazil circa 1981.

Historical Background: Pixote (1981) was the film that brought director Hector Babenco international attention, landing him a series of Hollywood opportunities that included Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Ironweed (1987), and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991). Before Hollywood got its hooks into him, he had made several films in Brazil, including King of the Night (1975) and Lucio Flavio – Passaqeioro da Agonia (1979), leading up to this breakthrough film of 1981. His American films were mainly of the art house variety. Pixote is in the tradition of such films as Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine (1946) and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950). It can also be considered an antecedent of the recent City of God (2002) co-directed by Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles. Those are three powerful and great films with which to be linked and Pixote can withstand comparison with any of them.

The Story: Like Los Olvidados, Pixote opens with a narrative prologue that establishes the authenticity of the issues depicted in the film. Hector Babenco is seen standing on a large mound overlooking a ghetto of São Paulo, Brazil speaking into the camera like a news reporter. He informs us that half of Brazil’s estimated 120 million people (as of 1981) are under age twenty-one and, of that half, 28 million live in poverty. An estimated three million children live as orphans on the street with no family whatsoever. The camera then zooms in on the eleven year-old child, Fernando Ramos Da Silva, who plays the central character, Pixote, in the film that follows. We have just seen where Fernando actually lived, in poverty, with his mother and her eight other children.

The film’s story is divided into two segments of roughly equal duration. The first half takes place in a boys reform school and the second half out on the streets. Pixote (pronounced like “Peh-shot”) has been rounded up with a slew of other boys from the street and taken to a reform school. The reason for the crackdown is that a judge – an “important” man – was recently killed by one or more of the street kids in an aborted street robbery. Life in the reform school is doubly dangerous. On the one hand, there’s the cruel and heartless director, Sapatos Brancos (Jardel Filho), and his guards and, on the other hand, the equally brutal older inmates. On his very first night, Pixote sees a boy about his own size in a nearby bed being raped by a gang of four older boys. The rape scene is filmed in nauseating realism. Both we and Pixote are duly distressed and alarmed. The victim has to be taken off to the infirmary in the morning.

Pixote, however, is quick to make friends with some of the older boys and thus acquires a protective circle of associates. His hair is shaved, almost instantly eliminating the vestiges of “little boy” status. One of his first friends is Fumaça (Zenildo Oliveira Santos), who introduces him to marijuana. At other times, the boys watch violent programs on television, pantomiming the “moves,” and role playing robberies for future application, once they turn eighteen or are otherwise released.

Unable to identify the actual killer of the judge, the police need a scapegoat to satisfy the press. They settle on a homosexual transvestite named Lilica (played brilliantly by Jorge Juliano) who is nearly eighteen years of age. Despite being beaten by one especially corrupt cop, Almir (Joao Jose Pompen), Lilica refuses to confess and take the rap. The police then transport about twenty of the boys to the police station for a line-up. Along the way, they remove two of the boys and shoot them to death, whether for sport or some kind of retribution is unclear. The witness at the police station is unable to identify any of the suspects in the line-up, though she remarks that one of the assailants was blond. Since Fumaça is the only blond boy in the group, the police decide to pin the murder on him. As it happens, earlier conversation between Fumaça and Pixote suggests that he was, in fact, the perpetrator of that particular crime. Fumaça is beaten so thoroughly at the police station that he dies shortly after being returned to the reform school and placed in the infirmary. Pixote happens to be in the infirmary at the time because he sniffed enough glue solvent to become temporarily delusional. When Fumaça dies, his body is secretly removed from the facility and dumped in a landfill. Now the police need another scapegoat to take the rap for Fumaça’s murder!

This time they go after Lilica’s lover, A.C., one of the oldest boys. He tries to defend himself with a knife but is ultimately beaten to death, finally succumbing after being dumped back in the boy’s dormitory room. Lilica instigates a rebellion in which the boys pile up mattresses near the door and start a bonfire. Lilica is set up to take the rap for his lover’s death and slashes his own wrists in order to get sent to the infirmary. That night, several of the boys including Pixote break into the infirmary and escape through an open window that Pixote had earlier scouted out.

Four of the boys, Pixote, Lilica, Dito (Gilberto Moura), and Chico (Edilson Lino) team up on to form a little street gang, supporting themselves with purse snatching and picking pockets. Dito and Lilica, the two oldest, also become lovers. They are able to survive on these petty crimes and build up a little cash reserve. Lilica links up with one of her former lovers, a man named Christal (Tony Tornado), who peddles cocaine. They purchase a stash of cocaine from Christal to sell on the street. The foursome head to Rio de Janeiro to meet a prospective buyer named Debora (Elke Maravilha), who works at a strip club. She stiffs them, taking half the cocaine, supposedly to a buyer, but fails to return with the money. Two of the boys, Chico and Pixote, run into Debora at the club while trying to peddle the other half of their stash. In the ensuing encounter, Debora punches Chico so hard that she kills him and Pixote stabs her in the gut with a knife. He quickly rifles through her purse, grabbing a gun and some money, and leaves her to die.

The three remaining boys, Dito, Lilica, and Pixote purchase a hooker, Sueli (Marilia Pera) from a pimp who is in a hurry to get out of town. Sueli has just gone through some unthinkable kind of self-induced abortion and Pixote comes across the remains of the fetus in a pail in the bathroom. Sueli is perhaps ten years older than the oldest of the boys, but needs them to operate her scam. She lures johns to isolated locations and then the boys appear and rob the guy of his money and pants. They then split the proceeds fifty-fifty. Dito starts to take an interest in Sueli, who is more than happy to oblige him. This causes Lilica to become intensely jealous and she finally splits after Dito and Sueli have sex on the same bed where Lilica and Pixote are watching television.

SPOILER ALERT: SKIP NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THIS FILM

Sueli lures a middle-aged gringo to her room and the man resists the robbery effort, knocking the gun from Dito’s hand. Sueli yells for Pixote to shoot the man with his gun. He does, but hits and kills Dito instead. The john begins to approach Pixote intending to disarm him as well, but Pixote shoots him dead with three shots. After the mess is cleaned up, only Pixote and Sueli remain. Sueli initially begs Pixote to stay with her, saying that she can’t stand being alone. Pixote lies down with the much older woman and cuddles with her. His head is next to her breast and, being torn between the impulses of childhood and adolescence, he lowers her blouse and begins sucking on one of her breasts. Sueli, at first receptive, begins to realize that this is more the act of a child seeking succor than an aroused adolescent. Sueli, who hasn’t an ounce of capacity or tolerance for motherhood, emphatically pushes him away and demands that he leave. Pixote tucks his gun under his belt, exits, and walks in solitude down the train tracks.

Themes: Pixote is blunt commentary on the brutal, dehumanizing, and, ultimately, destructive conditions in which innumerable children grow up. Although the setting is Brazil, all of us understand that similarly devastating conditions of poverty exist in major cities in many countries of the world, such as Mexico City, New York City, Washington, London, and Paris – to name just a few examples. Pixote is quite appropriately subtitled “the survival of the weakest.”

A secondary issue raised by Pixote is the viability of laws that exempt minors from prosecution for criminal activities. While ostensibly designed to protect minors from being prematurely discarded by society into the penal system, such laws also make minors prey to criminal elements in need of couriers, lookouts, and petty criminals to facilitate their activities. The minors are readily drawn into such activities because of their sense of immunity from long-term sentences. That in turn leads to large numbers of cases of delinquency and inevitable overcrowding in reform schools and juvenile detention centers. These centers then take on many of the brutal and destructive characteristics of prisons that are counter-effective to genuine rehabilitation. I don’t pretend to know what the answer is to the resultant dilemma. Certainly, it is evident in Pixote that the title character is only learning how to survive better on the street during his time in the reform school, not how to integrate into mainstream society.

Production Values: No one will ever accuse Hector Babenco of having sugarcoated the bitter pill in this powerfully disturbing film. Babenco presents the circumstances with such stark realism that watching the film becomes a virtual ordeal for viewers. You won’t find a more distressing and difficult film to sit through. That’s not to say that Babenco manipulates his subject matter for cheap emotional impact. Quite the contrary, he plays it entirely straight up and lets the material speak for itself. Babenco has the good sense to have confidence in his topic and his performers and lets these elements carry the movie. This is a brilliantly constructed film and the viewer’s distress only reflects that Babenco has done his job exceptionally well. You become the fly on the wall, in this film. You’ll feel that you can not only see and hear what transpires, but touch it and smell it.

In the plot summary above, I skirted over a number of scenes in which a variety of adults intersect with the world of the boys. Instead of providing relief, these scenes involving a judge, reporters, a psychiatrist, a nurse, and other would-be helpers, simply deepen viewer turmoil by illustrating how the system operates to disguise reality from these people and largely prevent them from positively impacting the lives of the boys.

The camera work is exceptional at times. There is one surreal scene depicting Pixote's hallucinations after glue-sniffing. There's a gorgeous scene at a beach in Rio where the boys, for just a few hours, get to be like ordinary boys enjoying a fun afternoon at the seaside and watching a lovely sunset over the ocean.

The younger members of the cast of this film was comprised entirely of actual children from city slums of Brazil. None had prior acting experience and very few ever appeared in additional movies. These boys were not so much acting as revealing their way of life. Fernando Ramos Da Silva is the heart and soul of the film, with his pained face and sad eyes. He manages to effectively portray the hardness and desensitization of a tough pre-adolescent as well as the desperate need for affection of an ordinary little boy. The ultimate irony, in relation to this film, is that Fernando Ramos Da Silva never did escape his roots in poverty. Being illiterate, he was unable to effectively study lines for future screen auditions and, despite his one-time stardom, returned to life on the street. He was shot down by the police in 1988 shortly before he turned twenty! Talk about life imitating art. There was a documentary later made entitled Who killed Pixote? that portrayed his brief life and untimely death. Another standout performance was the one turned in by Jorge Juliano as the transvestite Lilica. His take on the role was highly credible and not overdone in the least.

Bottom-Line: Although the American Academy refused to consider Pixote because of its content, the film won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film and has been acclaimed by critics throughout the world. The widely-admired critic Pauline Kael described Babenco as having that “perfect, poetic control of madness” that is sometimes so utterly necessary to describe the insanity of ordinary, everyday life.

Potential viewers need to understand two things going into this film experience: (1) it is an emotionally wrenching experience, and (2) it has many scenes involving nudity, straight and gay sex, sex involving children, brutal rape, sodomy, masturbation, murders, beatings, drug use, an aborted fetus, and profanity. This may be one of those films that you’re actually better off watching at home on the VCR or DVD player so that you can schedule whatever breaks you need for emotional reprieve. When one considers what these child actors were put through, one has to laugh out loud at the absurdity of the controversies that emerged because, for example, Linda Blair had to utter obscenities in The Exorcist, Tatum O’Neal smoked cigarettes in Paper Moon, or because the disturbingly precocious Natalie Portman was prepared to give herself to a much older man in The Professional. Pixote is in Portuguese with English subtitles and has a running time of 127 minutes. My copy was VHS and began with trailers for three other films. The DVD version has a few extras, including Babenco’s biography and filmography and a couple of trailers for other films (but none for Pixote).


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You might want to check out these other excellent films from Brazil:

Behind the Sun
Black Orpheus
Central Station
City of God
The Motorcycle Diaries
Quilombo.
Xica

Recommended:
Yes

Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age