Good cops turn bad cops in José Padilha’s cruel world. By JOE SHEPPARD.

THIS YEAR’s Golden Bear went to the Brazilian film Elite Squad, a kind of antidote for the youthful hope and retro-chic of the immensely successful City of God. Again the subject matter is chiefly the favelas or slums of Rio de Janeiro, but José Padilha highlights here the brutality of the special forces unit ‘waging war’ against the druglords and exposes the endemic corruption of the ordinary fuzz, whose top brass runs protection racquets much like the mafia.

Elite Squad is narrated by the pessimistic Captain Nascimento, who is searching for a successor every bit as hardnosed and cold-hearted as himself after impending fatherhood prompts new plans for early retirement. The two candidates, Neto and Matias, begin as idealists, the former as gungho as the latter is levelheaded and self-improving. An uncompromising training regime and the realities of the streets soon chisel these rookies into cynical automatons designed only to kill and torture. The operation they inherit – to clean up the slum next to the local cardinal’s home before the Pope arrives – is unpopular from the start because the predictability of the routine nightly raids only magnifies the danger, but Neto especially seems to thrive on the peril.

The rawk music, black berets, training-camp montages, and comrade tattoos are clues that Elite Squad may be enjoyed on one level as an action film for big boys. Yet the violence is never glorified – the asphyxiation tortures, where the subject ends up gagging on his own blood, are particularly brutal – and there are no sympathetic characters on either side of the fence to really rally behind.

The depressing conclusion reached early on in the film is that the only choice facing Rio police is to give in to corruption or to wage the bloody war against narcotics – it is simply untenable and dangerous to live in blissful denial and defend every last cog in a rotten war machine. Exactly how this decision plays out in everyday police procedures provided the comic highlights of Elite Squad. Half the time the cops are stealing from each other – including vehicles and protection money – or dumping bodies in other precincts to avoid paperwork. When the naïve cop Matias assumes a civilian identity to study the sociology of crime at university, he finds himself quickly isolated by his peers during the class debate on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – and when he is finally unmasked trying to be both cop and would-be NGO-rep for one favela, the consequences are horrific.

The Elite Squad has a lot in common with the gangsters they spend their lives plotting to kill, not least of all in the enormous arsenal of semi-automatic rifles and handguns. But Padilha’s rancour and scorn is reserved most of all for the recreational middle-class drug-users, who guarantee the social and economic tragedies in the slums by pushing their bricks of weed at college—and are loathed by cops and crims alike.