City of God

The bitterest, wildest ironies tend to come from reality, to be the ones that would look grossly implausible in fiction. The setting of Brazilian drama City of God is an actual place, a lawless, oppressively featureless prefab ghetto on the outskirts of Rio; and yes, the name of this godforsaken favela, or shanty town, really is Cidade de Deus, "City of God". You can only imagine that a very cruel streak runs through the imagination of Rio's urban planners.

Whenever guns are waved around on screen, especially by young excitable men, critics reach for the handy term "cycle of violence", but it's rarely been so apposite as it is here. The violence in City of God is relentless and cyclical; the narrative rests on a structure in which each generation of juvenile hoods lines up to be slaughtered by the next, younger and more ruthless. Although the film has a causal plot in which one event triggers another, events in Fernando Meirelles's gang-war saga escalate so bewilderingly fast that you feel as though you're watching one of those speeded-up microscope shots of multiplying amoebae.

The film's source, an autobiographical novel by Paolo Lins, apparently features 352 characters. Meirelles and screenwriter Braulio Mantovani pare down the cast considerably, but still it's not always easy to remember who's who: characters have snappy names (Shaggy, Clipper, Goose), sometimes eccentrically anglicised from the originals; new figures are barely introduced before being dispatched; allies become enemies; characters change names. The script keeps us nervously alert with a novelistic sense of teasing disorder: the explanatory voice-over is packed with digressions and equivocations, a playfulness that makes the story's horrors more trenchant, yet also allows us to look at them head on.

After a bravura start from (literally) a chicken's-eye view, the film spins us back into the Sixties and introduces us to a trio of young hoods known as the Tender Three. Amiable but brutal small-timers, they decide to rob a local brothel, an exploit that the film sets us up to view as a ribald lark, until we see the aftermath. A small boy named L'il Dice, a sombre shrimp with big ideas, has tagged along: it's only later that we understand with horror his part in the raid. A few years on, he has grown up into L'il Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), Rio's most feared drug dealer. Meanwhile, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) wants to stay clean and become a photographer, but it is a thankless, even reckless, proposition to lead a straight life in the favela: even a mild, law-abiding young bus conductor (Seu Jorge) is drawn into the maelstrom against his will, becoming a vengeful desperado. It's a terrifying world, with no higher power overseeing or catalysing these children's actions – no parents, barely any police visible, nor even older gangsters pulling the strings. You just get the sense of an enclosed insect universe running on its own self-generating heat, with the smallest, most voracious parasites – a gang of diminutive tykes, the "Tinies" – ready to take over and devour the lot.

One remarkable sequence supplies a crash course in the dizzying rate of flux that governs this world: we see a drug dealers' hangout, shot from a fixed camera position, changing over several years, mouldering and decomposing as one tenant after another moves in, in a constant struggle for territory. City of God is a stylistically flashy film, as exuberantly kinetic as that other recent saga of Latin American low-life, the Mexican Amores Perros. Meirelles and cinematographer Cesar Charlone rarely stop dazzling, even when they appear to be giving us the rawest social realism. Much of the footage is grainy, mildewed sepia, apparently badly processed: in reality, this uncooked quasi-documentary effect is trickery too, the clever treatment of different stocks. This artificed rawness means you sit up all the more when the film pulls such tricks as following the path of a ricocheting bullet.

The world has long tended to think of South American cinema as a stolid backwater, but why should we be surprised to realise that directors there, as much as anywhere in the world, are reworking the stylistic repertoire of Scorsese, John Woo and The Matrix? Meirelles, whose background is in commercials, may over-indulge himself at times, but he never strays from his seriousness of intent. For one thing, it's a shock these days to see a film that takes us back to the Seventies, complete with hairdos and fashions, while not wearing an ironic smirk. City of God actually has a disco showdown set to that most ludicrous period chestnut, Carl Douglas's "Kung Fu Fighting" and we don't think of laughing for a minute: this isn't Boogie Nights jokiness but the ring of historical plausibility.

Meirelles's most audacious co-opting of the concrete universe is his casting of actual favela kids in roles that must have been perilously close to their real-life career options. There's a riveting spontaneity to their screen presence – the result, in fact, of a full year's training – but this is not so much an ensemble film as a crowd film. Few individuals even stick around long enough to make a decisive solo mark, one major exception being Douglas Silva, as the young L'il Dice – barely out of nappies, a bespectacled, scowling homunculus who's already an unnerving miniature of Joe Pesci in GoodFellas. City of God, in fact, has been widely compared to Scorsese, for its bravado and its novelistic explanation of the workings of gang culture; it has also been compared, in its stylistics, to the more narratively sculpted Amores Perros. What it most reminded me of, however, was Perry Henzell's Jamaican gangster story The Harder They Come, partly because Meirelles too is exploring an aspect of black street life that has not been widely exposed before, partly because its characters, like Jimmy Cliff's anti-hero in that film, aspire to be legendary bandits: photographed in action by Rocket, L'il Ze is overjoyed to make the front page at last.

City of God is so transfixing in the vitality of its horror that Meirelles doesn't need to supply much light relief. There's a brief, good-humoured scene in which two women discuss the use of bananas as sex aids: not surprisingly, the scene quickly leads to a violent payoff. Little gore is visible: what horrifies about the violence is its ubiquity, its randomness, and the sense of an absolute moral void. The film's most shocking scene has a novice gunman obliged to decide which of two young boys to maim. The great problem is that Meirelles persuades us to accept the laws of life in hell only too quickly: we know from the start that there's no escape from the violence, and one character's eventual progress towards a better life looks almost like a derisory token gesture. Nevertheless, City of God is a fearsome debut from a film-maker with energy and invention to spare: to paraphrase Carl Douglas, it's a little bit frightening, but it's done with expert timing.

j.romney@independent.co.uk