Inside Story

HAPPY TOGETHER: Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro) and No Way (Gero Camilo) tie the knot.

Carandiru's episodic prison yarns pack a collective punch.

by Cindy Fuchs

The first moments of Carandiru are rough. The camera deposits you inside the notoriously overcrowded and treacherous São Paulo prison, where two inmates argue over one's right to slit the other's throat. When the warden arrives with the new doctor (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos), the other inmates separate the adversaries in order to hear out their versions of events. The would-be killer, newbie Lula (Dionísio Neto), is devastated to hear that his enemy, the sinewy, heavily tattooed Dagger (Milhem Cortaz), was, in fact, paid by Lula's mother to kill Lula's father.

The doctor listens to all this, as Ebony (Ivan de Almeida), an imprisoned judge who has settled the disagreement, apologizes for the "disgusting behavior." But the movie's focus is not so much the behavior as the stories behind it. These tend to be individualized bits of pathology, produced by poverty or ignorance, if not precisely linked to social conditions here. Rather, Carandiru uses the good doctor as a guide through an assembly of tragic, brutal narratives, most with unhappy endings.

Based on Estação Carandiru, a memoir by Dr. Dráuzio Varella, Hector Babenco's new movie has a more defined structure than his still-searing Pixote (1981), though it makes similar observations. (Young men born into hopelessness can't find a way out.) And while it recalls Babenco's Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), particularly in its use of gay inmates to embody vulnerability and complex self-identities (a pair of prisoners decide to marry, despite a father's upset), Carandiru's transitions between dream and experience is less elegant, more familiar (especially to anyone who watched Oz).

The doctor's earnest efforts to learn how his patients have come to their dire circumstances set up a certain pattern. He asks after the crime that landed a man in prison, and the narrative unfurls, without questions as to its verity. A dealer named Highness (Ailton Graça) explains that his desires for a white woman and a black woman led to two families and criminal jealousy, for which he took the blame. Best friends Zico (Wagner Moura) and Deusdete (Caio Blat) try to reunite in prison, but can't manage the hallucinatory effects of Zico's drug addiction. The prison population also appears to be organized according to these stories; who walks around relatively freely and who doesn't has to do with degrees of hardcore background.

For all its attention to the convicts' interactions, the film doesn't dwell on abuses by guards; they're mostly invisible, or lurking in the background, as the doctor focuses on his subjects' explanations and self-accountings. Yet, it comes to a wowza finish: The prisoners' riot and subsequent police massacre of 111 prisoners, on Oct. 3, 1992. This horrific event led, eventually, to the prison's demolition in 1994, as stories emerged concerning the institution's appalling conditions, and corruption of officials, cops and guards. If Carandiru's design is less than compelling, its memorable, sympathetic characters and calamitous climax make its moral, political and legal critique difficult to ignore.

Carandiru Directed by Hector Babenco A Sony Classics release Opens Friday at Ritz East.

recommended

-- Respond to this article in our Forums — click to jump there