Rachel Henderson Salles never disappoints, and his film "Linha de passe" is no exception. The movie tells the story of a middle class mother raising four boys in a large and unforgiving neighborhood in São Paulo, Brasil. Unlike Salles' most famous movies, "Linha de passe" does not tell a story of a hero or of a dramatic and impressive story of people overcoming extreme circumstances. It is a pure and undramatized story of a single-parent family just "getting by." The acting is believable to the point it is difficult to imagine the actors as anyone else but their characters. The writing is impressive, with five stories depicted and developed yet there is an amount of inconclusiveness left up to the imagination of the audience. It seems as though this story was received by Brazilians as being true and honest to what a picture of the typical life of a family in Brazil. As an American, I appreciated the apparent authenticity of the movie as shown through the excellent cinematography and writing. I would definitely recommend this movie.

Chris Knipp This collaboration between Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries) and previous co-director Daniela Thomas provides a look at the struggles of urban Brazilian youth without melodrama or ultra-violence. (Salles saw Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City of God as an impressive film but one that misled the public into thinking every Brazilian kid packs an AK-47.) The texture of the film is gritty, but attractive. Like the boys in Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers, the focus is on the sons in a family who have a natural glamor, but are presented in a neorealist style. Linha de passe is a term for passing a soccer ball from one player to another without its touching the ground. An English language title hasn't been found yet; the French used simply Une famille brésilienne/A Brazilian Family. The film is engaging, if a bit chaotic. The May-through-September time-lined structure helps add organization, but the effort to move constantly back and forth among five different characters and scenes becomes wearying toward the end, though the lack of any resolution certainly is an honest reflection of the protagonists' near-hopeless lives.Living in the slums of São Paulo, the country's most populous city, Cleuza (Sandra Corveloni, who won the Cannes Best Actress award in 2008 for this performance) is a hard, spirited woman who smokes, works as a housekeeper, and keeps having sons by different men. Cleuza is an obsessive soccer supporter with four boys, none of whom knows who his father is. She's pregnant again, and when her mistress notices, she edges her out by hiring another woman to replace her. Cleuza's youngest, Reginaldo (Kaique de Jesus Santos), who is black, is intent on resolving the mystery in his own case. He believes his dad is a bus driver and so spends all his spare time riding buses, befriending drivers, and learning how to drive a bus. His final exploit of stealing a bus and driving it off on his own, designed to draw attention to himself and thus lead him to his father, is based on a true story.Reginaldo is feisty, handsome, and precocious and his exploit is amazing, but the film balances its attention among each of the sons. Dario (Vinicius de Oliveira, who when very young starred in Salles' Central Station) is a talented soccer player who wants to make it on a commercial team. But having just reached 18 he is at the limit for hiring of newbies; when he finally finds a coach still interested in his impressive ball handling, shooting and (with prodding) teamwork, he finds out he has to come up with a big "tip" to get the team official to ease him in. Dinho (José Geraldo Rodrigues) works at a gas station, but his life revolves around evangelical Christianity. He's had some badness in his past, but is determinedly righteous now. Dênis (João Baldasserini), the oldest, has a small boy he very seldom sees and cannot provide support for as a motorcycle messenger. He is still paying for the bike. This need for money leads him to crime.The settings are real and gritty and the main actors, save Vincius, had no previous experience. All this contributes to the vigor, spirit, and naturalism of a narrative that grounds its drama in sociology. It begins with the statistical fact that a large percentage of São Pauolo's children are fatherless. There is little sense of social organization or services here.Dênis' momentary turn to theft and carjacking leads the film as far as it ever goes into Hollywood actioner territory. Meanwhile Dinho is having his faith tested and seriously losing his cool, little Reginaldo is moving up to joy-riding a giant bus, and Dario, who earlier went on a dangerous drug and alcohol spree in frustration, is seemingly getting that big break on the soccer field, but his lack of money to bribe the manager may doom his chances. Everyone is moving boldly forward, hopeful in the face of despair. One ends the film feeling wrung out and uncertain. Salles has become seemingly more realistic but also more pessimistic by now than he was when he made the emotionally moving but somewhat saccharine 'Central Station,' and he does not wreathe his ghetto youths in mist as he does the Che Guevara of 'The Motorcycle Diaries.' This is a valiant effort, with many engaging elements, but the final effect is somewhat lukewarm.The editing by Gustavo Giani and Lívia Serpa is unfailingly clear; it is not their fault if the focus on five plot lines at the end of the film becomes a little overwhelming, and ultimately numbing. If this is the influence of Iñáritu, that is always a dangerous one.Premiered in May 2008 at Cannes, 'Linha de Passe' is still unreeling in various countries. Seen at the San Francisco International Film Festival May 29, 2010. In the dual-theater projection, an unfortunate staple at the SFIFF, the print did not look very good; presumably a fault of the projection and not of highly experienced d.p. Mauro Pinheiro Jr.

debblyst Walter Salles's first Brazilian feature film since "Abril Despedaçado/Behind the Sun" (2001), "Linha de Passe" -- in which he shares direction credit with Daniela Thomas for the seventh time -- is a contemporary neo-realist essay that confirms Salles's humanist concerns. In these our times of cynicism, nihilism or downright pessimism, Salles's unbending belief in compassion, resilience and man's intrinsic goodness might seem naive or filled with Christian piety. But he's no preaching Pollyanna: he looks up to the great humanist filmmakers (Renoir and Rossellini on top) yet he never compromises in cheap schmaltz, happy-go-lucky naiveté or Hollywoodized feel-good endings.Inspired by the insightful TV documentaries co-directed by Walter's younger brother João Moreira Salles, "Futebol" (1998 - revealing some of the shady business/management practices in Brazilian professional soccer) and "Santa Cruz" (2000 - about the sweeping spread of Protestant cults in Brazil, especially among the poor), "Linha de Passe" takes the structure from Visconti's "Rocco and his Brothers" -- a mother raising four sons striving for dignity and a better life in a big, oppressive city -- and transposes it to an ugly, lumpen neighborhood (Cidade Líder) in the outskirts of São Paulo. The family is poor, not destitute: they belong to the working-class that's near-bottom but not quite. Forty-something house- cleaner Cleuza is pregnant with her fifth child (we never meet the fathers). Her four sons are teenagers Dinho, a gas station attendant who joins a Pentecostal cult in his search for purity of body and soul; sly Dênis, a motorcycle courier whose desperate need for money to help raise his baby son (he's separated from the boy's mother) and pay for his bike leads him to crime; closed-in Dario, who at 18 may already be too old to pursue his dream in professional soccer; and super-smart pre-teen Reginaldo, whose black skin makes him an outcast even in his own family, as he obsessively goes for bus rides in search of his unknown bus-driver father.The plot, structure and dialog may seem occasionally déjà vu, and the screenplay (by co-director Thomas and TV-writer George Moura, with "City of God"'s Bráulio Mantovani's "collaboration") doesn't quite succeed in developing the five individual stories with equal creativity and strength (Dinho's thread is the best, Dênis's the most contrived). Clichés surface whenever middle- and high-class characters are involved. And, as usual with Salles, water symbolisms abound: the rain, the soul-cleansing shower scene with Dinho and Dario, a baptism in the lake, culminating with a maddeningly obvious clogged sink, symbolizing the "clogged" lives of the characters.Despite all that, there's a LOT going for "Linha de Passe". The setting and locations are among the film's finest qualities: away from the over-explored favela environment and its usual combo of guns, drugs and violence, the film focuses on one often overlooked geographic and social landscape of Brazil's class structure. It's also a miracle of casting, from the right physiognomies (the five protagonists really look like they share DNAs) to the careful attention for accent-nailing, something very rare in Brazilian films (actors from different parts of Brazil speak with accents typical of São Paulo's periphery). Their performances are dazzling, especially when you consider that, excepting Vinícius de Oliveira (Dario), they're all feature film first-timers. Sandra Corveloni, surprise winner of 2008 Cannes Best Actress Award for her role, is the spine of the film as the weather-beaten, end-of- the-rope mother trying to hold her crumbling family together. The four boys are impressive, but José Geraldo Rodrigues is simply stunning as soul-searching Dinho: he's a seriously talented actor (it's also the best, richest role).Salles's tone is, as usual, melancholy but never maudlin; he's too classy to stoop to audience manipulation. He's found in D.P. Mauro Pinheiro ("Cinema Aspirinas e Urubus") the ideal cameraman for this film, away from the beautifying images that compromised parts of his other films -- the imagery here is dry, desolate, akin to some of the best recent South American movies by Lucrécia Martel, Pablo Trapero or Pablo Stoll. The emotional power comes out of staring at "real" people in real locations, in the best neo-realist tradition (the scenes at the soccer stadium are especially compelling). The carefully planned editing fully succeeds in keeping the 5 stories alive and interconnecting in fine rhythm. Gustavo Santaolalla's spellbinding, deceptively simple music proves once again that he -- more than any other contemporary film composer -- owns the secret key to open hearts and minds without ever sounding obtrusive, overblown or mawkish."Linha de Passe" wisely and democratically offers "open" denouements for each character's thread: it's OUR job to come up with the conclusions, and they'll depend on our (in)ability to believe there's still light at the end of the tunnel (for some of the characters, at least). But Salles+Thomas's affirmative position comes clearly in the shape of the closing credits' song: the classic samba "Juízo Final" by Nelson Cavaquinho ("The sun will shine once more/ Light will reach the hearts/ The seed of evil will burn out"). It's the same song that we heard at the closing credits of Jorge Durán's moving humanist manifesto "Proibido Proibir" (2007). It's no "coincidence": the song is there, as it was in Durán's film, because -- if we're ANY human -- we leave the theater feeling that, unlike the tons of junk movies which desensitize us in the name of "entertainment", we've just seen a film that ACTUALLY has urgent, important things to say. And says it sensitively, insightfully, poignantly.

msparadize This movie is similar to Walter Salles' "Central Station," in that it shows a part of Brazilian life that people know very little about: the poor suburbs of the big cities. This time, he looks at a family living on the outskirts of Sao Paulo and the everyday struggles they face. Salles shows what life is like for the poor in Brazil without the in your face violence from "City of God" but with the same grace and humor as Central Station. Part of the success of the film are the wonderful actors, who turned a decent script into much more. Sandra Corveloni won Best Actress for the film at Cannes, and Vinicius de Oliveira, famous for his amazing performance as a child in "Central Station," plays one of Sandra's sons. Kaique Jesus Santos plays Sandra's youngest son, who equals Vinicius' "Central Station" performance. Don't expect an action movie or love story, but do expect the chance to get a glimpse of the real Brazil.