São Paulo. Dozen of homeless juvenile delinquents are brought from the street to a police station, and then transferred to a reformatory for boys. Among them is orphan Pixote (10). Two troublemakers are escorted out of a van and shot by the guards on the field during a night. When a boy dies from abuse, the manager of the reformatory frames Garatao for the crime, who is later found dead. Pixote sets his mattress on fire, thereby causing an evacuation of the reformatory. He and his friends then escape through the window of the medical room. Pixote, transvestite Lilica, Chico and Dito go to Rio de Janeiro to try to sell drugs, but a showgirl, Debora, swindles them and doesn't return with the money. The boys then team up with prostitute Sueli, robbing her clients in the room, until an American fights back, which causes Pixote to shoot both him and Dito. Sueli then throws Pixote out back on the street.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, who rightfully compared it to Italian neorealism due to its naturalistic depiction of poverty, Hector Babenco's "Pixote" is a depressive, bleak, dark, dirty and sober essay on the lowest possible outcomes in life. The viewers cannot but feel deep sadness for the characters when they go through some of the worst situations that can happen in a human existence. The whole movie is one giant dead-end from which there is no escape. "Pixote" abounds with shocking moments: already on the first night in the reformatory, orphan Pixote witnesses an anal rape of a boy in bed by local bullies. Later on, the manager of the reformatory just shouts in front of the boys: "If you want to kill each other, do it outside, not in here!" During lunch time, a bully spits in Pixote's cup of milk and orders him to drink it. Pixote witnesses how the guards shoot two boys out in the open, in a well directed scene of two flash lamps going left and right while searching for them in the dark night.
In the second half of the film, once out of the reformatory, the kids shuffle pedestrians on the street, steal their purse and run away. On the toilet, a prostitute, Sueli, tells Pixote that a bunch of meat in a bucket is her aborted fetus. "Pixote" isn't for everyone's taste. It is so unpleasant, vile and unbearable that at one point one is not so sure anymore if all those dark scenes are actually good, but Babenco always avoids exploitation and sensationalism, and instead presents everything in a sincere, albeit resentful manner. An additional bitter detail is that the main protagonist, Fernando Ramos da Silva, indeed returned back to the streets and died when he was 17. Babenco presents these episodic scenes in quiet misery, as a neutral observer who records what life was back in his time for the future generations to see. Certainly, there are social issues here (homeless people, street gangs, unwanted kids...), but "Pixote" refuses to make these themes the main highlight, and instead focuses on its characters, who do the most random things because they are lost in this confused world. This leads to one of the most bizarre moments in 80s cinema, when the 10-year old Pixote is comforted by the prostitute Sueli who allows him to suck her breast in bed, only to later push him away and shout how she hates kids, summing up the movie in a nutshell.
Grade:+++
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