Jailbreak
Carandiru's return to prison brings a return to form for Hector Babenco.

By Dennis Harvey

PRISON MOVIES HAVE never been reliably popular enough to become a commercial genre unto themselves. But there's something about the setting's microcosmic offering of human nature under pressure that tends to bring out the best in filmmakers, or at least stimulate their sense of exploitative showmanship.

Hector Babenco has definitely sussed out the lucky aura around hoosegow dramas, since fully half his small body of features to date have been set partly or mostly in lockup. The better half too. Lúcio Flávio (1978) was his breakthrough film in Brazil, a huge local hit dramatizing the times of a real-life bank robber in and out of custody. Pixote (1981), an international sensation, used actual street kids to expose São Paolo's juvenile underworld and questionable justice system. Adapting Manuel Puig's novel for his first effort in an eventually ill-starred Hollywood sojourn, Babenco's English-language Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) won an Oscar (for William Hurt as the transvestite cellmate to Raul Julia's political prisoner), though now that looks like another Academy instance of honoring impressive stunt miscasting.

As two out of those three bore out, Babenco works best on projects closest to home and reality. Carandiru is solidly grounded in both, representing the full-circle happy ending that – when they're fortunate – happens to "international" filmmakers. As a native Argentine raised in Brazil, he transferred to the world of expensive English-language productions for an ill-starred period, then returned to South America.

The mixed results of his American-financed films, plus the very long time it's been since the wrenching Pixote, made Babenco look like an overrated if respectable director who'd passed his point of inspiration. But Carandiru picks up where Pixote left off, thematically and artistically. It's not only his best film since; it also boasts a sense of passionate engagement, even playfulness that sloughs off those intervening 23 years.

Named after (and actually filmed at) the by-then-shuttered São Paolo institution where it takes place, Carandiru is based on a semi-fictive book by Dr. Drauzio Varella, who volunteered there for 14 years. He retold the stories of various inmates he met there, changing details and names for their protection. Babenco compresses those tales and characters further, though both book and movie end with first-person accounts (actors address the camera, as if interviewed) of a catastrophic 2002 riot ending in police killing 111 unarmed men. After that public relations (not to mention human rights) fiasco and the movie's shooting, the antiquated facility was torn down.

This murderous episode is indeed a "hellish depiction," as various reviewers have noted. But as intense and edgy as Carandiru is throughout, up to that point it's surprisingly warm, funny, and melancholy by turns, as well as shocking, grotesque, violent, etc. Part of that is due to Babenco's fondness for outcasts. Part is because, for all our horror at incarceration conditions in developing nations, things here both look worse and somewhat better than the sterile, hypercontrolled environs of U.S. maximum security. Prisoners freely roam in cell blocks; money can openly buy creature comforts; overcrowded cells are so personalized that some look like walk-in art installations.

The rabbit warren created by 8,000 convicts shoehorned into a space meant for 3,000 perhaps necessitates greater self-control. Even the warden admits, "They run the place," as guards are called in only to handle problems that hierarchical prisoner alliances can't or no longer want to control. A strict internal code of ethics maintains rough, unofficial justice. A convicted rapist doesn't last long before he's found dead, an alleged "suicide," while there appears to be little or no sex crime inside. (By contrast, a serious American prison flick without at least an attempted rape would seem incongruous.)

Not that this is a happy home, of course. Reckless drug debts, a simmering in-house AIDS epidemic, interpersonal grudges, loose mental hinges, and so forth provide plenty of conflict in the film's first 100 minutes. That long first act (before the climactic riot set piece) is a triumph of seeming formlessness that's nonetheless watertight: Babenco and co. merely let the new Doc (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos) absorb his unfamiliar surroundings, variably appalled and amused, while inmates entertain him with anecdotes of what got them here in the first place.

These flashbacks are like high-octane short stories, their extremes worthy of Chuck Palahniuk or Hubert Selby Jr. What unfolds in jailhouse "real time" is luridly colorful too: one young man spins out on crack, to horrific results; elegant, tall transvestite and squat tough guy marry in a formal ceremony; a bigamist's two hella jealous wives fly at each other on visiting day. While you may wonder why the doctor has so much free time to play patient listener, there's no question why he's mesmerized.

Before this apocalyptic dormitory explodes, Babenco's slightly irreal realism (the lighting is borderline baroque) has humanized the whole milieu beyond simple shock value or condemnation. Carandiru is an oddity, despite all familiar prison-pic traits: a one-location epic composed almost entirely of digressions, veering from black comedy to domestic poignance to full-on terror, intimate and narrative-rich throughout. Less stylistically dazzling than last year's not-dissimilar criminal jigsaw City of God, Carandiru is ultimately the better movie for caring more deeply about its cast of the rejected and hopeless.

'Carandiru' opens Fri/21 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.