It is all true: the film structure, with three interweaving plots, the dialogs, reduced to the absolute minimum, the way the movie has been shot all that contributes to its status of a masterpiece in cinematography. If someone says it is boring, I'd like to reply: it is so condensed with the content, that if you have enough gray cells under your skull, they will not stop working even for a second during the perception of the film.
Personally, the film has overwhelmed me. It was a short peep into another world the world of which existence it would be more convenient not to know. Not that I hadn't, before I watched the movie. Perhaps I was more absent-minded on that theme. The film's documentary-like quality made me feel, even more than think, that while I eat my meals, look after my family, sleep or work, somewhere in the world the whole death-machine runs non-stop. Some young girl with their whole life in front of her prostitutes herself for two centimeters of heroin, some driver's palms sweat when he crosses the frontier with drugs hidden in his car, someone falls out of the game with a single shot in his forehead, maybe having wetted his pants out of fear before he died. And, first of all, the money and power continues fluctuating, both between the prominent ones the drug-businessmen, who tenderly love their children, and between the marginalized the people who, through drugs in that or another way, get their own piece of power and control. E.g. the black people ("black" emphasized, to stress their marginal position) successful at dealing the drugs to white students, thus getting back the sense of domination they wouldn't have been able to attain in the white-privileged society by any other means.
So, even now, someone is getting stoned, maybe for the last time in his or her life. I cannot say if this consciousness is going to carry me from the sense of powerlessness to any sort of a constructive counter-action. As you are reading this, I know that you smile and say: so idealistic, naive and banal. I don't care. A single lost life is an undeniable fact that lays some weight to my shoulders. After watching "Traffic", try as I may, I cannot shake that weight off.
Personally, the film has overwhelmed me. It was a short peep into another world the world of which existence it would be more convenient not to know. Not that I hadn't, before I watched the movie. Perhaps I was more absent-minded on that theme. The film's documentary-like quality made me feel, even more than think, that while I eat my meals, look after my family, sleep or work, somewhere in the world the whole death-machine runs non-stop. Some young girl with their whole life in front of her prostitutes herself for two centimeters of heroin, some driver's palms sweat when he crosses the frontier with drugs hidden in his car, someone falls out of the game with a single shot in his forehead, maybe having wetted his pants out of fear before he died. And, first of all, the money and power continues fluctuating, both between the prominent ones the drug-businessmen, who tenderly love their children, and between the marginalized the people who, through drugs in that or another way, get their own piece of power and control. E.g. the black people ("black" emphasized, to stress their marginal position) successful at dealing the drugs to white students, thus getting back the sense of domination they wouldn't have been able to attain in the white-privileged society by any other means.
So, even now, someone is getting stoned, maybe for the last time in his or her life. I cannot say if this consciousness is going to carry me from the sense of powerlessness to any sort of a constructive counter-action. As you are reading this, I know that you smile and say: so idealistic, naive and banal. I don't care. A single lost life is an undeniable fact that lays some weight to my shoulders. After watching "Traffic", try as I may, I cannot shake that weight off.