It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a professional listener who lives most of his waking hours in music — the most abstract and intangible of the fine arts — might, from time to time, find it necessary to retreat to an entirely different realm. Film is a larger-than-life world of visual images and dramatic narrative and other elements with a verisimilitude beyond the scope of music.
I have been going to movies for about as long as I have been involved with music, and I have found the two pursuits equally rewarding, in complementary ways. Music and film each stimulate and challenge emotionally and intellectually in ways the other cannot.
Walter Salles’ “Central Station” works for me on an emotional level quite unlike any recent film I have seen. The Brazilian film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, as was Fernanda Montenegro for Best Actress, in this year’s Academy Awards.
I have seen this Brazilian road picture twice and each time I have been moved by its subtle, naturalistic treatment of a subject that could easily have degenerated into sentimentality. Indeed, I was carried along by this movie the way an inspired opera performance does.
There, however, the similarities end. Opera is about theatrical illusion on a grand scale, with art and ego jostling for the spotlight. Film allows us the luxury of characters completely without makeup and stage costumes–literally, in the case of Montenegro, who is the antithesis of an operatic diva. Disappearing completely into the primary role of Dor, a sour former schoolteacher who makes her living writing letters for the illiterate poor in Rio’s bustling railroad station, she is as real as every prima donna is transparently false. She delivers a performance so honest, so lived in, it ceases to feel like a performance.
An unlikely bond is formed between the cynical spinster and Josue (talented newcomer Vinicius de Oliveira), the hapless boy she befriends after his mother is killed in a traffic accident outside the station. The film traces this odd couple’s journey into Brazil’s barren northeast, where the boy hopes to find the alcoholic father he never knew. At the end of the road, their shared experience leads to greater self-awareness and a capacity for caring neither knew before.
Ultimately, director Salles’ compassion for his characters and the simple, haunting grace of his storytelling made “Central Station” my favorite film of 1998. I’m just praying nobody decides to turn it into an opera.
