January 22, 2003

IT BEGINS WITH a close-up of a knife being sharpened against pavement. Next comes another close-up, of a chicken's head, and some cunningly edited handheld shots of meat cooking and feathers floating down to the ground. One bird stupidly stares at the spectacle of others being beheaded, eviscerated, and plucked, then makes a run for it, crazily weaving through dirty alleys and barely averting auto wheels as boys with guns give pursuit. With this series of images – an absurd chase sequence flamboyantly presented and dynamically edited – Fernando Meirelles sets the mood and tone of his City of God. He also constructs a metaphor for the fast lives and early deaths of the movie's subjects, children of Rio de Janeiro's favelas who fight lose-or-lose battles within the drug trade.

City of God is a housing project, but rather than simply present it as a setting, Meirelles views it as a character – perhaps the dominant one – in the film. When the story begins, in the '60s, the project seems village-size, at least until, in one of the first of many bravura flourishes, a crane shot reveals the vast, unvarying multitude of dusty streets and shacks a character is trying, and fatally failing, to escape. Yet that vision of doom seems idyllic in comparison to the monstrous, exit-free crazy maze the City of God has become by the '80s, when the plotline (adapted from a novel by Paulo Lins) returns to the chicken run of its opening seconds, revealing it as a mere setup for human carnage.

In another vivid segment, a single fixed point of view witnesses the deterioration of an apartment as it's passed down from one drug dealer to another. The stronger and younger the kingpin, the trashier his kingdom. But static points of view aren't Meirelles's specialty. Working with codirector Kátia Lund, he's stylistically giddy in the face of so much adolescent and preadolescent violence, running circles around the surface linearity of the plot's chapter structure (in addition to the twice-seen chicken run, there is the entrance of the film's chief teen gangster, which is thrice viewed) and uncorking an array of techniques: God's-eye aerial shots that suggest the almighty has a finger on the fast-forward button, freeze-frame character intros that revive blaxploitation swank, and camera movements that follow the paths of ricocheting bullets or circle around the violence with the speed of a meth-addled figure skater.

The reason – cynics would say excuse – for this exhilarating but uncomfortably flashy directorial joyride might be that the movie's narrator and central character, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), is a photographer who broke out of the world the film so closely surveys. There's no doubt that Meirelles's approach functions like a calling card: even more than Y tu mamá también and Amores perros, this is a "foreign" blockbuster tricked-out in Hollywood flashy style – evoking Goodfellas, Boogie Nights, and Pulp Fiction in particular. City of God has drawn criticism from voices who dislike its high-gloss presentation of poverty and youth mortality. (Apparently such topics must be treated in an earnest, visually unflattering, anticommercial way, or not at all.)

Depth of characterization isn't the movie's strong point, but City of God's quieter moments possess subtlety: when the questing daydreams of one young couple echo those of a similar pair from a decade earlier, any trace of morality has been replaced by greedy immaturity, and Meirelles doesn't beat you over the head to make you notice. As for the film's color saturation and nervous, fractured energy, they could be manifestations of weed- or coke-consciousness as much as an extension of Rocket's more rigorous photographic focus. "We were far from the picture-perfect postcard image of Rio de Janeiro," Rocket says at one point, but Meirelles has in fact constructed an action film full of postcard images. They just aren't the kind you'd find in a tourist store.