Central Station

Do subtitles give you a headache? That's why I popped the preemptive Advils before watching Central Station. I didn't know that the film itself comes loaded with a pretty heavy dosage of Valium. I'm still feeling the effects of my overdose now.

Central Station is a Brazilian film directed by Walter Salles, who, judging from this movie, seems to be the Al Gore of film directors. This is NOT an action flick.

Salles starts us off at Rio de Janeiro's Central Station. Dora (Fernanda Montenegro) makes a living at the train station by writing letters for people. Well, with the major exception that she takes these letters and, rather than posting them, runs them home where she rips them open and laughs heartily. Postal fraud is a federal offense, you know. Oh wait, we're in Brazil.

Anyway, Dora writes a letter for a woman and her little boy Josué (Vinicius de Oliveira) in which the mother asks her drunkard husband to return home. As they walk away from Dora's stall, however, mom gets run over by a delivery truck. That scene, by the way, has got to go. It's enough to know that mom dies a horrible death. We don't have to SEE it. Seeing it only makes us laugh because it's so farcically done. Salles even gives us the "splat" sound.

The boy Josué runs back to Dora and asks her to post a letter to his AWOL dad. Dora sees that he has no money and refuses. Maybe she's mean, but she just saw the kid lose his mom, and now she's refusing him even this little help? Say it with me: Two-Dimensional Character. Well, Josué is persistent and keeps hanging around Central Station until Dora finally collects him. Dora sells him to a shady adoption agency run by an even shadier security officer for 2,000 bucks. The security officer, it turns out, swears, looks really rotten and shoots petty thieves in cold blood. Well, Dora goes home and begins to develop a conscience, so she runs back and takes off with the kid. The security officer follows in hot pursuit. Ugh.

From that point on, Dora and Josué ride buses all over Brazil looking for the dad. Ho-hum. Best scenes: 9-year-old Josué gets drunk on Dora's wine (mmm... booze) and goes buck-wild on the bus. Also, the motley pair hitches a ride on a truck with this absolutely horrendous gospel-type singer, and Dora gives us a look of total disgust. Imagine a cross-country trip in a Civic with Vonda Shepard riding gun. Actually, that pretty much describes Central Station. The film's not horrible: It's just boring. It renders sleeping pills unnecessary.

-By Chetan Rao