Each night she returns to her apartment and receives visits from her next door neighbor Irene (Marilia Pêra), who is also alone in the world. Dora spills out her bitterness at humanity, including the clients who have put their trust in her. She goes through their letters with Irene and makes fun of the human feelings contained in them. Half go directly into the garbage can, because she thinks they are not worth posting. The other half end up in a desk drawer, to be posted when she gets around to it. While she picks apart the poor folks whom she writes for, Irene, a few years younger and less bitter, pleads for clemency while usually being overridden.
One day she is approached by Ana (Sôia Lira) and her nine-year old son Josué (Vincius De Oliveira). She wants to send the boy up to the remote northeast area of Brazil to meet his father for the first time. She dictates the letter to Dora and gives her a photo of the boy to send to the father along with the letter, so he will be able to recognize him when he arrives. Dora takes the letter back to her apartment and sticks it in her desk drawer.
The next day Ana is run down by a bus in front of the train station. The homeless Josué has no place to go and begins spending his days and nights in Central Station. Every so often, Dora--despite herself--offers him a kind word or a sandwich. There is a nationwide epidemic of homeless children in Brazil, a problem that was treated cinematically in "Pixote." Many of these children turn to crime in order to survive and their prospects for survival are bleak. "Central Station" shows a teenager being gunned down on the railroad tracks by a cop for the crime of stealing a walkman.
In a mixture of opportunism and pity, Dora takes Josué to an adoption broker. She receives a thousand dollars and is assured that he will be sent to a "good family" in the United States. She buys a new Sony TV with her commission and shows it off to Irene. When she explains how she got the money, Irene screams at her. Nobody will adopt a nine-year-old. They will kill him and sell the organs on the open market. Dora, who still has a tinge of affection for the boy, decides to rescue him from the broker and personally take him to his father.
Thus begins a remarkable journey that is unlike any I have ever seen in a film. It is a "road movie" that simultaneously takes the bitter old woman and the child deep into Brazil's countryside, and into the recesses of their own hearts. Through a series of mishaps, the two find the journey much more daunting than they first expected. They learn to rely on each other's emotional support and street smarts. In the process, he forgives her for selling him to the broker, while she begins to experience love for another human being for the first time in her adult life.
What gives their odyssey additional power from a cinematic standpoint is the on-location filming in the roadside cafes, bodegas and small towns in Brazil's dry and mountainous northeast. The characters whom we meet in these scenes appear to be ordinary Brazilians from the area, whose faces are much more beautiful and appropriate to the action than any professional actors' could be.
The casting of Dora is critical to the success of the film. In the production notes, Director Walter Salles describes 67 year old Fernanda Montenegro as Brazil's Gena Rowlands or Giulietta Masina. She is an enormously intelligent actress who has starred in the leftist film "They Don't Wear Black Tie." The choice of Marilia Pêra is also interesting since she played the prostitute who ran with the gang of child outlaws in "Pixote." Vincius De Oliveira was a shoeshine boy whom Walter Salles discovered outside a small airport in downtown Rio de Janeiro. He says, "Because it was raining and he didn't have any clients at the moment, he asked me to help him buy a sandwich. He told me that once I returned from the city of Sao Paulo that afternoon, he would pay me back." In other words, the shoeshine boy who is cast as Josué really is a Josué.
"Central Station" hearkens back to some of the greatest films of Italian neo-realism like "The Bicycle Thief." It will also remind you of the films of Satyajit Ray, whose affection for common folk did not preclude a critical view of their foibles. The difference between "Central Station" and the garbage coming out of Hollywood each week lies in the social and economic differences between Brazil and the United States. Countries that are living on the edge, like Ray's India, De Sica's postwar Italy or Brazil today can foster art that gets closer to the human condition. The desperation borne out of economic and social dislocation can work on the sensitivity of the sympathetic novelist or film-maker and great art often emerges.
While "Central Station" does not offer any pat answers to Brazil's problems, there is no doubt that the obstacles that economic hardship puts before the disadvantaged appall Walter Salles. Dora is not some kind of political activist. Indeed, her cynicism would make her an unlikely candidate. Instead she articulates the hopes of ordinary Brazilians for a society in which love and happiness is the rule. We are reminded of the title of Ken Silverstein's study of the Workers Party: "Without Fear of Being Happy."
Yesterday, somebody sent me some email trying to figure out where I was going with my articles on Marxism and indigenism. I tried to explain that it was part of a life-long struggle to redefine a socialism on the basis of freedom from want, in an environment of human solidarity. Like the characters in "Central Station," the great majority of the human race is looking for love and companionship on a personal and communal basis, while not having to worry about where the next meal is coming from. Nearly everything else is extraneous.
The director Walter Salles understands this completely. In explaining the critical acclaim the film has received, he says:
"...I think the question of the search is very important in the film. We're talking about the woman who searches for her lost feelings and a boy who searches for his father. Since the Greeks, I think we've always been concerned with the idea of getting back to the place where we come from--to try to understand who we are. This is the boy's plight, but what the two of them discover is not only the family at the end of the film, but the importance of companionship, friendship and understanding.
"In a way, these values are not really appreciated in today's very competitive society, where efficiency is everything. These questions of solidarity or friendship or everything that's important in the film are not rated in the Stock Exchange. This might also be one of the clues to why people respond to the film in such an emotional way. It talks about things that are not perceived as important but are extremely important for our survival."
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)