The Loaded Political Legacy of ‘Elite Squad’: How a Brazilian Blockbuster Became a Symbol of the Right-Wing Attitudes it Aimed to Critique
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On the surface, George Lucas’ “Star Wars” has little to do with José Padilha’s “Elite Squad.” One is a fantastical space opera about princesses and droids, the other is a ‘90s-set thriller about police brutality and institutional corruption. And yet — in Brazil — the two films are bound together by an almost identical cultural footprint. “Elite Squad” is as close to a bonafide Brazilian blockbuster as it gets. Not only is Wagner Moura’s Capitão Nascimento perhaps the country’s most well-known fictional character, but his lines are still quoted to this day, often by people who don’t even know their origin.
The launch of “Elite Squad” in 2007 was an event unto itself. Before the movie could be released in theaters, it was leaked through bootleg DVDs that cost — at today’s exchange rate — approximately $1 USD. Ironically, the leak helped to expand the film’s reach, with people who had seen it multiple times eventually flocking to theaters when it finally opened, thereby cementing the success of Padilha’s epic.
But where something like “Star Wars” filters its political themes through a fantastical lens, “Elite Squad” is nothing if not nakedly political. From the filmmaker’s premise to the audiences’ response, Padilha’s film is built entirely around the social, economical and criminal realities of a country whose consumer population has little patience for provocative art, and is frequently antagonistic to it. Mainstream Brazilians, let me tell you, do not often like to see our country’s worst qualities reflected on the biggest possible canvas. Brazilian directors are often criticized by non-cinephiles, and particularly those on the right, as activists who are too focused on social issues. Long, hard looks in the mirror, especially as local theaters become more and more dominated by Hollywood blockbusters, are quickly discarded as “woke.”
And yet, here is a commercial mega-hit that does just that in no uncertain terms. Revisiting the film from the perspective of today’s fractured landscape, such a thing feels almost unfathomable — and worthy of recognition, even if the success of “Elite Squad” can be owed as much to its flaws as it is to its strengths.
“Elite Squad” follows three main characters, all of whom belong to BOPE, a unit whose logo — a knife through a skull — foretells their modus operandi. Aside from Moura’s Nascimento, a captain, we also accompany André Mathias (André Ramiro) and Neto Gouveia (Caio Junqueira), two naive rookies still unfamiliar with the dirty things going on inside the institution. As the new recruits learn the ways that law enforcement agents and drug dealers mix and match, Nascimento’s narration guides us through the rules, both written and unwritten, of this unforgiving world. Being a regular officer like André and Neto, he tells us, is a death sentence in the favela. Only highly skilled BOPE members can survive there.
Throughout the film’s runtime, we will see father-to-be Nascimento execute some of the BOPE’s most dangerous operations — including safeguarding the Pope during one of his visits to Brazil — as he looks for a successor in either André or Neto. Through the novices’ gaze, fascinated with the “men in black” — BOPE’s informal nickname — for their supposed virtuous ways of policing and their tactful, but brutal approach, we begin to understand “Elite Squad’s” contradiction. Thematically, this is a story about Rio de Janeiro’s police department’s failure in conducting its drug war, and dragging the whole city down with it. Ask Padilha, and he will confirm as much. Ask “Civil War” star Moura, an outspoken leftist, and the actor will describe Capitão Nascimento as a villain.
And yet, what we see from Nascimento, André and Neto’s point-of-view — and from the way Padilha directs the film’s action and training sequences — is nothing short of myth-making. There are no two ways about it: Capitão Nascimento and the BOPE are made to look like supreme badasses. To observe “Elite Squad” through Padilha’s lens is to see François Truffaut’s argument that “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film” brought to life. The movie’s opening setpiece, which is revisited midway through the story, is shot like something out of Paul Greengrass’ “Bourne” sequels. Fast-paced editing, handheld cinematography, and the modulation of tension practically guarantee that no BOPE action goes by without its fair share of thrills.
It’s action filmmaking at its finest, and no matter how violent or torturous things get, the men behind them are portrayed in striking fashion. At the same time, it would be a stretch to say Padilha renders them as saints, and it’s hard to watch the various interrogation scenes without feeling a knot form in your stomach as no man, woman or child is spared the BOPE’s wrath. A stomach-turning moment occurs when, in trying to avenge a fallen comrade, the police storm the favela with disturbing force and torture a “student” (a word Nascimento uses against this anonymous young man in derogatory fashion). Though Nascimento’s honesty grows in tandem with his nastiness — the character regularly admits, in his words, that the system is broken — it all feels justified because, again, they are our entryway. We never see Brazil through any other perspective. There are good (violent) cops, corrupt (also violent) cops, and criminals. The most well-realized attempt at criticizing the police is from a socio-economical angle, as those weary of the force and the financially challenged people who keep it on its feet are typically rich and oblivious to the realities of the favela’s habitants.
In one particular scene, André, the film’s sole Black protagonist, impresses his colleague’s NGO workers by observing that a young Black boy’s hardships at school come not from his flawed study ethic, but because — like himself — the kid needs glasses. It’s an honest bid at complicating the story’s dynamics, but the writing simply isn’t there to sustain it. It’s no exaggeration to say that the film’s biggest problem comes from its greatest success: the script by Padilha, Rodrigo Pimentel and Bráulio Mantoviani. It is a tale of two halves; sharp, funny, and interesting when it comes from a talented thespian like Moura, and blunt, superficial, and bland when dealing with the movie’s few left-leaning characters. They’re either unbothered by the dealers’ violence, or contribute directly to it.
André is the only character with something you could call an arc. As interested in practicing law as he is in enforcing it, he begins the movie with noble intentions, but through Nascimento’s rigorous training and personal devastation he gradually loses all trace of his humanity. Although André doesn’t exactly start from the best of places, Ramiro’s performance acutely traces the death of his character’s kind personality, thus rendering a poignant fall from grace.
That fall would be endlessly more powerful, however, if the influences competing with Nascimento’s appeal were as rich and fascinating as the captain himself. André’s college crush Maria (Fernanda Machado) reads like a parody of bourgeois women written by men who scarcely understand them, and her character proves typical of Padilha’s struggles to render the complexities of his hometown, despite his ability to paint a vivid picture of Rio in broad strokes.
Which ultimately leads us to the film’s current standing in Brazil. In spite of Padilha and Moura’s personal views, and in spite of their success in viscerally conveying the dynamics of Rio de Janeiro’s criminal underworld, “Elite Squad” is fundamentally betrayed by its greatest achievement: The creation of an unforgettable, charismatic, and impactful anti-hero who believes that nearly anything the BOPE does is not only necessary, but honorable. A character who is filmed in the most awesome way possible at virtually all times.
Perhaps that explains why, despite having its fair-share of defenders among left-leaning critics, “Elite Squad” seems to have made its way into Brazil’s mainstream culture not by virtue of its sharp investigation of police brutality, but rather because many Brazilian right-wingers see it as a confirmation of one of their biggest beliefs: “a good criminal is a dead criminal.” It’s a philosophy that supports BOPE’s “shoot first, ask question later policy,” and one that was co-opted by the autocratic Jair Bolsonaro during his rise to the presidency. As a candidate, he would often present himself as something like a political BOPE: a man capable of destroying his left-wing adversaries, ones he would regularly describe as criminals. It’s no wonder his supporters’ favorite hand gesture — something Bolsonaro did on plenty of occasions — was a pair of finger-guns.
Like the Punisher logo in America, BOPE’s skull became a right-wing icon. Their musical theme, Tihuana’s “Tropa de Elite” — a self-mythologizing song the group claims is about themselves, but has been appropriated by soldiers, cops, and firefighters alike — is presented without a hint of irony, thus nullifying its satirical machismo. Their black uniform loses the ethos of an ugly death and transforms instead into a herald of pure justice. Nascimento jokes it makes them look like Batman.
Brazil’s cinema is still fiercely political on its own terms, and recent works such as Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós’ “Dry Ground Burning” and Petra Costa’s Oscar-nominated “The Edge of Democracy” confront the country’s landscape head-on, Lula and Bolsonaro very much included. But in its divided state, Brazil’s population appears to have unfortunately closed the door on transforming challenging art into the kind of thing “Elite Squad” was: a hit.
Some things get close; Padilha’s Netflix show, “The Mechanism”, made a bit of noise, but faded away as the years went by. For the best proof of this, however, look no further than Padilha’s return to BOPE’s world. More complex in its plotting, “Elite Squad 2” digs deeper into the corrupt machinations surrounding the police, the favelas and Rio de Janeiro’s politicians from a very different perspective. For instance, Nascimento, who critiqued the so-called “system” in the first film, becomes a flawed but well-intentioned politician trying to change things from within.
On the one hand, “Elite Squad 2” easily outgrossed its predecessor — no bootleg DVDs to siphon money away from the box office this time. Like many sequels, however, its cultural footprint is significantly smaller than the original, and if we’re sticking with the “Star Wars” metaphor, perhaps “Elite Squad 2” would be something of a “The Last Jedi,” in that it dares to question canonical orthodoxy. The main difference between the films lies in how they treat BOPE. In what clearly reads as a reaction to the popularity of the first film, Padilha makes the special forces share the spotlight in the second movie, with an eye towards diminishing their cool factor.
That Padilha felt compelled towards that kind of course-correction doesn’t make his first “Elite Squad” a bad movie. It does, however, undermine the film’s legacy. “Elite Squad” may have been conceived as one thing, and it has merits in fulfilling its original purposes. Nevertheless, it is much more effective at doing the exact opposite. If you were to understand Brazil solely based on the film, BOPE’s practices would look like an extreme, but indispensable way of policing. It is, then, no wonder Nascimento has been described as Brazil’s greatest fictional hero. The character would never actually say that, but man, is “Elite Squad” good at convincing us he is.
