the people of david riker's the city ( la ciudad ) are easily recognizable : poor destitute mexican immigrants living in listless boroughs of new york city . and the director's careful , patient examination of their incessant , daily struggle to survive by taking any job they can get constitutes most of what the film is about . the city is comprised of four short vignettes , all very poetic in their open-endedness . in the first one , bricks , a group of mexican laborers is taken to the field of nearly ruined buildings . they are left in the middle of nowhere and promised 50 dollars a day for cleaning up bricks . when the ruins of a demolished building collapse and kill one of the workers , the rest can't even explain to the ambulance where they are . home , the second story , offers another look at the immigrant dilemma . a young man , francisco , while searching for his distant relatives , stumbles into a party and ponders about his choice of coming to america to a woman he meets . he doesn't know anyone in the city and all his possessions fit in one bag he carries with him . the moment of comfort he obtains by sharing his sorrows with a woman from his native town in mexico is fleeting -- he is lost on his way from a grocery store back to her apartment . the protagonist of the puppeteer is a loving father , who lives with his daughter in a car and survives by performing puppet shows to the local kids in the neighborhood . they watch the moon at night while the father reads fairy tales to his daughter , hoping that some day she will be able to go to school with the other kids . she won't , as it turns out , because he can't provide a receipt proving that his daughter lives in the city . the final and the most desolate is the story of seamstress , a woman who comes to america to earn money for the family she left behind . she is devastated to find out that her daughter is sick , but , as in the previous three tales , her situation is hopeless : the sweatshop owners keep promising to pay , but it's obvious that the woman , as well as the other desperate workers , will not get a cent for their labor . the stories of this spare , reserved documentary-like black-and-white film give face to the faceless , to those aspects of urban and , most importantly , human experience we usually avert our eyes from . riker turns to traditions of italian neorealism , a genre whose premise was to bring real people and contemporary social problems into focus . like most films of that era , the city expresses no hopes for deep social change and is thus an incredibly inert film . it is authentic , somber and tragic , and the poverty it depicts could have been captured anywhere in the world . the fatalism that pervades the lives of riker's characters calls for a depressing conclusion : that nothing will ever change for these people . when a seamstress demands to be paid , other workers stop working and stare at her breakdown in the agonizing silence . not being paid for weeks , without any security in their lives , will they express solidarity with her ? probably not . david riker does nothing to pull your heartstrings , which is why the film is so honest and devastating . but it is the absence of any kind of inner force in the film that disturbs me more than its morbid subject matter . i remember john huston's fat city , about two fighters from stockton : one is aging and paunchy , who had his moment of glory but whose next stop is skid row ; his young counterpart has chosen the same fate , despite the living lesson before his eyes . stockton is not new york -- no one in their right mind will ever go there , and fat city isn't about immigrants , but about failure and poverty . it is a brutal and bleak picture , but the way huston depicts his characters is dramatically different from riker : it is a film about people who are beaten before they start , but who never stop fighting . their despair has the smell of liquor , unmade beds , and cheap hotels , but they obstinately bounce back and refuse to take defeat for granted . it is perhaps the passivity of la ciudad , both in content and style , that makes this film a bittersweet disappointment . 
