by Peter Bradshaw

Walter Salles, director of the much-admired Central Station, has here given us a wonderfully photographed, exquisitely paced, if sometimes overwrought story of childhood, love and revenge in the desolate plains of Brazil. This is a plain tale, transplanted to South America from the Albanian setting of Ismail Kadare's original novel, which distinguishes itself by the simplicity, clarity and severity of its visual sense and the beautiful compositions framed for Salles by his cinematographer Walter Carvalho.

Everything takes place in the broiling heat of the featureless scrub, in a village called Stream-of-Souls, a place which the eight-year-old narrator Pacu describes as so hot that the stream has dried up and only the souls are left. That unforgiving image is a paradigm of the film itself: everything is boiled down to essentials - the starkest images and emotions.

Pacu, played by Ravi Ramos Lacerda, is the youngest child in a family that farms sugar cane in the grimmest possible surroundings: a harsh way of life in which the cane must be cut in the burning sun, then ground by a mill turned by a team of oxen thrashed by the father until they buckle with exhaustion - the animals' lives being hardly distinguishable from those of their human masters. The finished product is taken to market where the price is being inexorably undercut by the new steam mills.

Almost bestial poverty is never far away in a landscape where trees, rocks, houses, bodies and clothes are all sun-scorched the same rusty ochre colour, and in which the human beings are sometimes hard to pick out, as if they have evolved their own camouflage.

The boy's family are involved in a murderous feud with a neighbouring household: it apparently originated in a dispute over land, although the exact cause of their quarrel, when it started and who drew first blood, are never mentioned. Their mutual hate is timeless, and both families seem to accept that the tit-for-tat murders will just go on for ever, and they are chained to their unending cycle of revenge like the oxen.

Pacu's older brother Ignacio has just been shot; his other brother Tonho (Rodrigo Santoro) is ordered by the glowering father to go round to the other family and kill one of their sons. There is no authority to stop this: no state, no police, no church, just the revenge tradition of the badlands, a pattern so well established it has ritual accretions of its own. The victim's shirt is hung out and revenge can only be sought once the dried blood turns yellow; the murderer is actually allowed to attend the victim's wake and pray for the soul of the departed on the grounds that he will almost certainly be joining him anyway. This situation is brought to a head when Tonho announces that he wants to sue for peace: his astonished father takes this to be cowardice and dishonour of the most unthinkable kind.

Salles' film is remarkable for its compressed ferocity, as if the midday sun has baked their minds past boiling point to some kind of existential meltdown. At the dinner table, Pacu begs Tonho not to go and kill anyone - and the father slaps him, and I mean really slaps him. A child getting slapped in the face by a cruel, overbearing father is a staple of the cinema, of course, but I don't think I have ever seen a child struck with quite as much wince-inducing force and realism: there is an audible crack as he seems to take a couple of teeth out. This violence is accepted as stoically as the lashes meted out to the beasts of burden.

When Tonho falls off Pacu's swing and pretends to be dead, but then jumps up and clowns around, everyone laughs - Tonho, Pacu, their mother. But then, extraordinarily, the father joins in too, laughing far too hard, showing his dark and rotten teeth - and it makes the other three suddenly silent. That may be because they, like us, find unnatural the sight of him laughing and it may even be that, like us, it is the very first time they have seen those horrible teeth. But it is also because he is making light of death - taking lightly the idea of his son's own imminent murder. "In this house," the mother grimly says, "the dead command the living."

To stand up to this pattern of despair and reject the prerogative and duty of vengeance takes moral courage, which is where the movie loses some of its focus. Tonho does actually carry out a revenge killing and, after an escapist spell following a beautiful circus dancer to a nearby village, he does in fact return to face the revenger who is after him.

The story is resolved with a tragic, yet serendipitously willed accident. It's an ending with power and pathos, though it isn't clear if or how the cycle of violence has been ended, or how adult moral courage has entered into it. In the end, there are no star-crossed lovers to bring peace, just the ambiguous figure of Tonho alone on a beach. For all the elusive, even evasive quality of this final act, Salles has crafted an arresting fable, powerful, yet far from any Once Upon a Time in Brazil-style grandiloquence, with some stunning, painterly imagery.