Brazil, the late Sixties: After flooding in Rio de Janeiro left many homeless and unemployed, the government shunted this destitute population thirty miles outside the city limits to a slum called Cidade de Deus. As the shacks turned to makeshift apartment buildings, the drug of choice shifted from marijuana to cocaine, and the weapons that the teenage boys carried soon became automatic rifles. The tensions of poverty, narcotic paranoia, and little hope of a future outside of the slum left the likes of Little Ze and Carrot to carve out pauper’s empires with the blood of other underage foot soldiers in a civil war that still continues to this day.

Fernando Meirelles’s sprawling crime epic City of God was criticized by many on its release earlier this year for its rapid edits and MTV-assault visuals. A film that begins with elliptical cuts of a blade being sharpened on a stone betrays a filmmaker all too aware of the tempo of voice he is addressing his audience in. An aggressive, frantic voice, but, given the subject matter of a young community trapped in a cycle of violence, an appropriate voice. A voice as visually violent as the tales it has to tell yet a voice which is also controlled. A control that creates a stark contrast to the psychotic daze of testosterone, coke, and desperation that characters like Little Ze personify. Yet for all the frenzied jump cuts, City of God is never merely an inhumane repetitive bludgeoning of Little Ze’s, or his enemies’, rampages. Merielles most outstanding moments are when the momentum incongruously stops and catches its breath. Shaggy, a robber on the lam, bursts through a neighbor’s door looking for a safe haven only to be markedly distracted by his first glimpse of his future love, Bernice. Bene, the most likeable of the gun-toting killers, reminds us that he still too is just a teen when he challenges Tiago to a bike race that is half childish exuberance, half burgeoning friendship. The story’s narrator, Rocket, is frequently more preoccupied with that universal adolescent obsession in the losing of one’s own virginity than relating to us the barbarous rise of Little Ze that provides the backbone of the narrative. For a film that has been accused of relentlessly avoiding its own simplification of serious problems, Meirelles makes sure his most humane moments of hope stand out from the tumbling velocity of the world he recreates. And he maturely makes sure that these audience-pleasing gasps of hope are strangled by the realities of the situation.

With this in mind, is City of God really just a first time director showing off, leaving a calling card to the amount of movie tricks he has noticed and tossed into his debut? No, Meirelles’s storytelling dexterity, his athletic experimentation with how he shows or runs away from a time lapse, is in keeping with his themes and tales. The fact that we return so often to the same points, the fact that repeated frames crop up later in their character’s arcs (like young Bene and Little Ze hugging each other or the motivation behind Knockout Ned’s assailant), is to reinforce that once this cycle of violence was started, it could never be stopped. The final Mexican standoff, which begins and ends the film, contains not just these echoes from past moments but also the reappearance of key objects, as in Roeg’s Don’t Look Now; the gas van from a long past heist plays a pivotal role, pistols handed over like candy to prepubescents return to doom their former owners. Once Meirelles tears up the rulebook of temporal chronology, one realizes that in this milieu, there really is no escape from the mortal certainties of this war. Each scene is the knock on effect of some previous violent action and while learning what happened to Shaggy or who killed Knockout Ned may fill in a blank, it doesn’t answer why things have fallen apart so badly.

It is left to Rocket, wordlessly chasing the big story with his camera, to answer why. As he dashes through the labyrinth of cheap, dilapidated buildings, pock marked with bullets holes, to get a photo of the police and bureaucratic bribery that allows this disaster to perpetuate, he matches, in pace and enthusiasm, the director’s relentless high-speed collection of images that tell a thousand truths about the real Cidade de Deus. The year’s most innovative and complex piece of world cinema’s only crime is being a culmination of the last century of cinematic narrative experimentation. Let’s take it into custody.
—BOB CARROLL