I included Central Station in the top ten in my list of Best Non-English Language Films. If I had a list of my ten favorite films all-time, it might or might not qualify, but it would clearly be in the running. This is a film that earns its sentiment and emotional edge without resorting to cheap clichés or maudlin plot devices. At its core, it deals with the relationship between a crusty old, cynical woman and an orphaned boy, but it succeeds, ultimately, because it also fully extends that relationship to the audience.

The film opens in busy Central Station in modern day Rio de Janeiro. The dog-eat-dog atmosphere is immediately established by the arrival of a train. As travelers crush up against the doors in a rush to get a seat, others climb through the train windows to beat them out. This is the setting in which our protagonist, Dora (Fernanda Montenegro), supplements her meager pension by means of a heartless scam. Each day she sets up her writing desk and a few chairs in the midst of the huge terminal, offering to write letters for the city’s illiterates for the price of a dollar. While the customers dictate heart-felt messages to distant loved ones, she contemptuously pens them out without compassion. The clincher, though, is that Dora betrays the trust of these people by tossing most of the letters away. Based on some arbitrary criteria of her own, some get filed in the waste basket, some get stuffed in a draw, and only a few actually get mailed. The Dora that we meet in the early part of the film is a heartless, unattractive shrew, a retired, washed-up school teacher of 67, embittered by the emptiness and loneliness of her own life. She has the quality of an abused child, rejected and scorned, who seeks solace by taking out her pain on humanity. We can’t hate her, but we certainly don’t like her. One of the daring precepts of Central Station is the idea of building a film around a protagonists so utterly repulsive as the film opens.

One of Dora’s customers is an immigrant woman with a young boy of nine, named Josue (Vincius de Oliveira). She dictates a letter to Dora for the boy’s father who lives in a remote part of northeast Brazil, asking for a reconciliation. As the two depart, the mother is struck by a bus right outside Central Station and Josue is instantly rendered orphaned and homeless. He soon approaches Dora, the only person he has met in his short time in Rio de Janeiro, but her reply is a dismissive, “Scram!” He loiters around the station, sleeping in corners, and steals from shops. Dora sees this and also observes an older shop-lifter being shot to death by the police. Her wall of callousness is only slightly shaken, but she takes the boy home when she departs for the night. Soon, however, she has shored up her hard heart and sells him to a shady “adoption agency” for a fee that she then uses to purchase a new television! Dora’s one friend in life is a neighbor named Irene (Marilia Pera). Irene points out to Dora that Josue is too old for adoption and that gangsters in Rio de Janeiro operate a ring whereby children are killed for their organs. Dora is thus shamed into a drastic (and daring) action – stealing Josue back from the people with whom she left him.

Dora now has a double problem. She has a nine-year-old to deal with and must get out of town before the thugs can locate her. She decides to undertake the 3000 mile trip needed to deliver Josue to his father. This begins a new phase of the story, as the film now becomes something of a road film, as well as the metaphorical journey of mutual discovery for the old woman and the young boy. On the road, they travel by bus and hitch rides with truck drivers. For viewers, it becomes among other things a remarkable tour through parts of Brazil that tourists seldom see. If one of the jobs of movies is to transport viewers to places they never have and never will see in person, then Central Station succeeds admirably in that respect.

The real journey, however, is Dora’s reawakening as a sentient human being. Fernando Montenegro achieves her character’s transformation into a likable, feeling woman with a measured delicacy that renders it entirely believable to the viewer. It is small wonder that she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 1998 along with winning the awards for Best Actress from the National Board of Review and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Montenegro played the part wearing no makeup looking fully her 67 years of age, yet by the end of the film, she had transformed her appearance, merely by her change in demeanor, from a wretched hag to an older women with a significant degree of mature beauty. While Dora provides the boy with the maternal care-taking he so desperately needs, he rekindles in her the capacity for love and, in the end, the capacity to sacrifice in the name of love. A palpable bond is formed between Dora and Josue and between the two of them and the audience.

The story of the casting of Josue (with Vinicius de Oliveira) is touching in its own right. The director, Walter Salles, was at his wits end to find a boy actor to play the part of Josue, when, at the real Central Station (or at the Rio airport by another account), the 10-year-old Oliveira, a shoe shine boy, begged Salles for the price of a sandwich. Salles looked at him and immediately recognized Josue! Although Oliveira’s role is not as challenging as Dora’s, Oliveira provides a performance that touches the heart. One especially clever scene occurs at a religious revival along the road when the two are entirely out of money and food. Josue gets the bright idea of setting Dora up at a writing table with pen and paper, as he had met her in Central Station, to write notes to Jesus dictated by the impassioned revivalists!

The ending of the story needs to remain a surprise for each individual viewer and will not be recounted here, except to say that it is skillfully rendered and satisfying. When Salles, who not only directed but conceived the story, was asked why he made this film, his answer was, “When you come from a privileged part of Brazilian society, as I do, you have to opt either to be part of that culture of indifference or to understand what the country really is.” Although Central Station is first and foremost a very personal story of the capacity for rebirth of one’s humanity, there is also a subtle political message in relation to the numbing poverty that exists for many in Brazil.

Central Station was nominated in the Best Foreign Film category in 1998, losing out only because the highly acclaimed It’s a Beautiful Life was competing in the same year. The film is rated R for language and violence. It is filmed in Portuguese with English subtitles. Apparently, there’s a less desirable dubbed version as well. The running time is 115 minutes.

You can’t help but to be moved by this film; otherwise, you’ll need to pinch yourself to determine if you’re even alive. It earns your involvement in the most honest way possible: with a highly literate script, great performances (especially in the lead role), transporting you through the Brazilian countryside, but, most of all, by reaffirming the human capacity for transformation – from embittered cynicism to purpose and love. This is a truly great film!


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

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


Recommended:
Yes

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