We and the characters of the film never get there. Instead, we are firmly placed in the lower city and its rough and tumble, a kind of Brazilian mean streets.

This is sometimes grim, sometimes glum. People are trapped by their situations, their personalities, their lack of opportunity, their limited horizons of what is possible in life, their pragmatic and survival codes and morals.

This is a hand-held camera view of Brazilian life. In many ways, with all the close-ups of the three central characters, we are too close to them, witness to their feelings and the more intimate sides of their lives, including their ignorance of what might constitute a better life.

Deco (who is black) and Naldinho (who is white) have been friends since school days. They carry all kinds of goods up and down the river. They manage. When they meet a young girl who wants a lift to Salvador, they bring her on board and do a sex deal for her passage. She is a prostitute and, later, a pole dancer in one of the lower city clubs they frequent. She loves them both but that does not prevent bouts of envy, jealousy, anger and violence between the two.

This is a slice of low life. But, even that sounds patronising, especially coming from those who have more opportunities. This is a slice of life at the day-by-day, tough, sometimes squalid, sometimes happy margins of the big cities of today.

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