HAVING followed The Motorcycle Diarieswith a slack, pointless American remake of the Japanese horror movie Dark Water, Walter Salles returns to his native Brazil and to socially concerned themes in Linha de Passe, which he co-directed with his occasional collaborator, Daniela Thomas.

The title is a Brazilian football term for passing the ball without letting it touch the ground. The film features mostly non- professional actors as it observes the hard lives of a poor family, single mother Clueza (Sandra Corveloni, voted best actress at Cannes this year for her performance) and her four teenage sons in a Sao Paolo favela.

Clueza is pregnant again and threatened with losing her job as housekeeper to a well-off doctor, even though, martyr-like, Clueza risks her life in precariously cleaning the doctor's windows many storeys above the ground. There are no father figures in this family, even though at least two men have played a part in their existence.

Clueza's sons are a motorcycle courier, already a father himself but unable to support his child; a petrol station attendant repeatedly jibed for his involvement with an evangelical movement; an aspirant soccer star who discovers that scouts have to be bribed if he is to make any progress; and the youngest, aware from his darker skin that he has a different father, whom he is obsessed with finding. All he knows is that he's a bus driver in a city of 20 million people.

This dour movie is glaringly obvious in scenes such as one where that boy gets a demonstration of driving a bus. We know it's only a matter of time before he steals a bus, as he does, driving it with uncommon skill.

That's only one of several unlikely contrivances in a worthy but disappointing film that's expertly photographed in its action sequences, but crucially lacking the narrative precision and emotional engagement Ken Loach would have brought to its well-intentioned but cluttered scenario.