Brazilian film-maker Walter Salles had a huge breakthrough success with this big-hearted road movie in 1998. It is a prize-garlanded and Oscar-nominated film that made a serious player of its director and an international name for its then 69-year-old female lead, Brazilian stage and screen star Fernanda Montenegro. She plays a querulous woman called Dora who finds herself travelling across the country, on the edge of poverty and almost on the run, from Rio to the Sertão in Brazil’s remote north-east, in the company of a bewildered, angry, vulnerable little orphan boy whose life she has just (unwillingly) saved.
It’s an often unashamedly sentimental movie about redemption in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin and Vittorio De Sica. An ingenious, if glib, final twist gives the tale its solidity, though you can taste some processed sugar in the mix; from a modern perspective it’s possible to compare this to rom-dram pictures such as Message in a Bottle and The Lunchbox. Central Station’s two characters happen to be looking for someone called Jesus; a common enough name in Brazil, of course, but the audience is entitled to suspect more, given that this man is supposed to be a carpenter and his loved ones believe that he will one day return – that is, make a second coming, back into their lives.
