Movie Review
Detention, despair, devastation

By Jeff Shannon
Special to The Seattle Times

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For a vivid portrait of hell, look no further than Hector Babenco's "Carandiru."

The film is based on the book "Carandiru Station," which topped Brazilian best-seller lists for more than three years. It's a richly detailed account of life and death in the São Paulo House of Detention (aka Carandiru), an overpopulated, disease-ridden halfway house for unconvicted criminals that was the site of a notorious 1992 bloodbath.

Obviously "Carandiru" is no walk in the park. It begins with the threat of a deadly clash between two combative inmates. Just as quickly we learn that this dank, humid pit of desperation is also a place where rules are made and enforced by prisoners held in limbo without trial and left to govern themselves.

There is freedom of sorts, including conjugal visits and easy access to illicit goods and services, but the inevitability of a violent breakdown is palpable in the thick and musty air.

Movie review *** "Carandiru," with Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, Ailton Graca, Wagner Moura. Directed by Hector Babenco, from a screenplay by Daniel Filho, Victor Navas, Fernando Bonassi and Babenco. 145 minutes. Rated R for graphic violence, profanity, drug use, mature content. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Varsity.

Best known for his classic films "Pixote" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman" (both covering thematically similar territory), Babenco films this crowded hive of misery with such immediate realism that you can barely look away.

Many of Brazil's finest actors populate the cast, and although the film suffers from episodic structure, using flashbacks to establish backstories for the prisoners, the characters remain vividly distinct and memorable. Anyone who's seen 1977's "Short Eyes" will recognize similar storytelling here, and Babenco's film has an even sharper edge of intensity.

The prisoners' sordid tales are told through the civilian perspective of the doctor (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos) who volunteers at Carandiru with an open mind and compassionate spirit, struggling to contain an AIDS epidemic while treating other diseases that would prompt a lesser man to bolt for the exits. He's based on "Carandiru Station" author Drauzio Varella, who volunteered at Carandiru for 14 years. Coincidentally, Varella is also Babenco's personal physician and friend, who successfully treated the cancer that sidetracked Babenco's career for most of the 1990s.

Their friendship, and the compression of the book's many characters into fictionalized composites, may have subtly compromised Babenco's keenly dramatic instincts. Varella has justifiably praised the film, but it rambles more than it should, and even the doctor's presence fails to give "Carandiru" any kind of unifying plot. It's more of a hyper-real docudrama, telling an abundance of smaller stories that never connect to form a big one. Apart from delving into the depths of authentic prison squalor, it's hard to pin down Babenco's intentions.

Still, "Carandiru" has moments of raw, unflinching power, and the 1992 massacre — in which police invaded Carandiru and killed 111 inmates out of alleged "self-defense" (no police were injured), is depicted with the kind of potency that (like "City of God") prompted reform in Brazilian prison policy.

Carandiru was demolished in 2002, and Babenco's film ends with footage of its implosion. A youth park has since been erected there, and "Carandiru" ends on a note of healing that brings no small relief.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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