Slum kids' lethal firepower

Two cities are going to be the talk of the town in the next fortnight. Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York - and this one, City of God. Both make you believe there is no God. Or at least none that matters. Both delineate a hellworld - Scorsese with mural breadth; Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles with moral depth. I leave Scorsese's film until next week.

City of God is the story of drugs, guns and urban violence in a slum (favela) satellite of Rio. It belongs to what Brazilian film-makers are calling "The Good Wave". Like the French nouvelle vague, it tears up the old-time styles of Latino torpor and conventional narrative. It is hyperkinetic. It cannot stop moving, cutting, expanding the screen and splitting it four ways, contracting it on to a detail, circling its characters like a vulture, and all the time addressing the way that kids become younger and firepower more lethal.

It comes on you like a whirlwind. What it shows being sown is what the people of the favelas are reaping: a crime crop that cuts down each generation in its prime. It will strike most viewers as even more horrendous than the work of American masters of violence Scorsese and Tarantino, because its cast are nearly all children, nonprofessionalspicked off the streets and scarcely needing to be told how to talk, thieve, kill ...

We follow them through three decades, each one wilder than the last and the film sometimes loops back on itself to add details to a scene we've seen, so that it gains moral complexity as well as physical immediacy.

In the 1960s, an 11-year-old boy in the ironically named shanty town, the "City of God", sees a gang called "The Tender Trio" - kids like himself - carry out a raid on a brothel. It's this kid, named Rocket, who'll be our voiceover guide to the next decades.

In the 1970s, he's covering the neighbourhood with a movie camera. Nothing's changed for the better. Massacres break out as one hoodlum falls out with another. Drug barons grow up like poisonous weeds. By the 1980s, gang warfare has the force of law in the favela. And children, knee-high to the "goodfellas" of the favelas, know how to graduate into the ranks of extortionists, hitmen and worse.

It's not a film without humour, grim though this is. It's the celebrity ethic that saves Rocket from the usual fate. The gang bosses preen themselves in front of his lens. The old brothel-gag, "Don't shoot the pianist", has become the new boast, "Don't shoot the cameraman".

The last street battle is seen through Rocket's viewfinder - and then comes a surprise. We see a video of the real-life carnage, the actual bloodletting, that we've just seen re-enacted. You can scarcely tell the difference. Artifice reveals its hand here, of course, though Fernando Meirelles, to do him justice, has never concealed the fact that he shot much of the film in slums that were no part of the actual "City of God". The real location was simply too dangerous.

It has to be emphasised that despite the horrifying lesson in how a community can be taken over and utterly corrupted, the film is almost puritanical in its social attitudes. It even asserts that some of the blame for such conditions lies with the very media of which the film itself is a part. But it doesn't fall into the same trap. It doesn't exploit. It exemplifies, and that's enough.

We know that such a film will change nothing, reform no one. It exists because the evil it records exists. You're almost grateful for the reticence of the talents that have refused to shape it into a neatly packaged event for the foreign market. It is an organic entity, a bravura reality. It stands witness to what's happening in Latin America at the moment. See it - and understand.

City Of God (Cidade De Deus)
Cert: 18