“Central Station(1998)”: A Journey towards Light
(for IMDB profile of “Central Station”, click here)
Human being is strange breed… always standing between angel and devil. Everyone has contradictory feelings within.. love and hate, sympathy and anger, faithfulness and greed. Dora, a more than 60 years old ex-school teacher, now a professional letter-writer is the central character of this movie. She writes letters for those who can’t write. And her ‘office’ is the station platform of the central station of Brazil. Everyday, she comes back home, calls her friend Irene, read the letters together and makes fun out of it. After reading, she dumps most of them and selects a few to be posted someday (which never arrives really). One day a woman came to her with her 9 years old son Josue to write to her husband who left her a long ago and lived in a faraway place. The next day she came again and ran down by a bus while returning. Being all alone Josue came to Dora and she behaved very rude. Only when Dora got a proposal for selling Josue to an organization which she was told make adoptation possibilities for orphan children, she took josue to her apartment and sold him the next day. She bought a TV with the money and then came to know that that institution actually was a seller of children body parts. After knowing this, that cruel greedy woman Dora took a risky step to steal Josue from that institution and start a journey in search of his father.
This journey is a lifetime journey which changed Dora from a cruel person to a affectionate person.
This film has touched my eyes. It has a certain visual beauty. It has touched my heart as well. The story is simple, yet heart-wrenching.
I must say the greatest attribute of this film is it’s originality. It is simple, touching, original and surprisingly refreshing. Walter Salles is a master director and this movie showed the genius of the man.
I’m not a Brazilian, I never went to Brazil and know a a very little about that country. Yet I felt the characters as well as the story is familiar to me. And while watching the movie, I felt like I’ve become a part of it. The movie has no extravagant outcome of emotions, rather it is expressive in a placid way. Specially, the ending is a “should-be-remembered-through-lifetime” kind of sequence. Acting was so expressive that even anyone watch the movie without sound and subtitle, he/she would be able to understand the story. Fernanda Montenegro (as Dora) and Vinícius de Oliveira (as Josue) were simply great.
T he music score was very much situational indeed and went with the mood of the film.
If you haven’t watch the movie yet, please make time to watch it. It worths a watch.
So, should i tell you- “Ahoy! Welcome to the journey!” ?
