Carandiru

Casa de blues: Carandiru reveals the grim facts about a real-life prison drama

By Anthony Allison

Alcatraz, Sing Sing, Devil's Island, Abu Ghraib: There's now another name to add to the chilling list of notorious names familiar from prison movies--or from real life: Carandiru.

Hector Babenco's new film is set in the notorious, overcrowded--and mercifully defunct--detention center in S‹o Paulo, Brazil, where some 7,500 detainees awaiting trial or sentencing were held in a sprawling facility designed to hold less than half that number.

And if Carandiru initially feels like just about the strangest prison flick ever--more soap opera than prison drama, chockfull of the usual, clichéd suspects (thieves, drug dealers, rapists, murderers) and bordering at times on comedy--it pays to stick with it. In the last 40 minutes, just when the sheer ridiculousness of the scenario is getting to be too much, Babenco's film unleashes a powerful punch that puts the preceding melodramatic excess into poignant perspective.

Because it turns out that this seemingly exaggerated story--while allowing for dramatic license by screenwriters Babenco, Victor Navas and Fernando Bonassi--is more or less true. Their film is based on the book Carandiru Station by Drauzio Varella, a doctor who worked in the Casa de Detenã‹o for 12 years.

Without revealing the film's devastating climax, some words that the movie's doctor (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos) reads in voiceover--and which Babenco chooses to include near the end of his movie--set the scene perfectly: "In the late '80s, AIDS prevention work in jails took me to the S‹o Paulo Detention Center, Carandiru. There I heard stories, made real friends, learned medicine and penetrated a few of the mysteries of life in jail, which would have remained inaccessible were I not a doctor."

Leading the richly-drawn gallery of "friends" that this overworked medic makes, is Ebony (Ivan de Almeida), a stressed-out trusty who runs the prison kitchen and settles disputes between inmates. Among his charges, whose backstories are presented in flashback, are petty criminal Zico (Wagner Moura) and his childhood buddy Deusdete (Caio Blat), jailed for defending his sister Franci's (Julia Ianina) honor; Highness (Ailton Graãa), a man torn between two lovers, Dalva and Rosirene (Maria Luísa Mendonãa, Aída Leiner); and armored truck heistmeisters Miro and Antonio (Ricardo Blat, Floriano Peixoto), whose successful career in crime foundered thanks to a duplicitous snitch (Leona Cavalli).

Meanwhile, cheerful transvestite Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro), who claims to have had 2,000 lovers, finally finds true love with "her" husband "Too Bad" (Gero Camilo); hit man Dagger (Milhem Cortaz) finds solace in religion; and veteran jailbird Chico (Milton Gonãalves), takes comfort in his hobby, launching toy balloons before stoically enduring a month in solitary confinement.

Almost a quarter century ago, Babenco, an Argentine-born Brazilian, leapt to international fame with Pixote: The Law of the Weakest, a devastating 1980 drama about S‹o Paulo street kids. Then, with his 1985 adaptation of Manuel Puig's novel Kiss of the Spider-Woman, Babenco earned an Oscar nomination for directing Raul Julia and (in an Oscar-winning performance) William Hurt as cellmates in a South American prison. More recently, Babenco's career was interrupted for eight years while he battled, and eventually beat, lymphatic cancer.

With Carandiru, Babenco triumphantly comes full circle, completing his crime-and-punishment trilogy, by returning to the teeming metropolis he depicted so memorably in Pixote. This sequel of sorts takes the sad hint of the grim future awaiting that film's street-smart young hustlers to its inexorable, unavoidable--and tragically true--conclusion. But don't let that put you off. Carandiru is saved from being a total downer by closing, documentary shots that add a vaguely hopeful postscript to this otherwise sad, sobering story.