Carandiru

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Not for the faint-hearted, the new film by Hector Babenco is based on a real event - the 1992 riot in the grotesquely overcrowded Sao Paolo prison of the title, which led to the massacre of 111 inmates by state police.

The film, which plays as drama but feels like documentary, is unflinching about the conditions prisoners endure. Those who have never seen body fluids other than their own should think carefully about whether this is for them.

Babenco, an Argentinian by birth and Brazilian by artistic history, has set films in prisons before: much of 1981's harrowing street-kid tragedy Pixote played out in a detention centre and his most widely seen film, Kiss of the Spider Woman, adapted a stage play set in a two-man cell.

Carandiru conceives of the prison as simply the grimmest of the city's many slums. It takes us deep into the inmates' community and into lives which are a tangled mass of complicated allegiances. The device Babenco uses pays tribute to the story's provenance: he first heard it from his doctor who was the prison physician and persuaded him to write it up.

That doctor, played by Carlos Vasconcelos, comes to the prison to help with Aids prevention and becomes the conduit through whom we get to know the characters as he hears their stories unfold in flashback.

Not all are lovable, or even likeable, but Babenco wants us to know them: Highness (Graa), a drug lord who has hit men in his service inside and out, but whose plan to keep his two mistresses from meeting has hit a snag; Zico (Moura) and Deusdete (Blat), childhood buddies whose intertwined fates are sickeningly predictable; Old Chico (Gonalves), a father of 18, who worries about the challenge of release.

The film even has a love story involving the statuesque and hormone-soaked drag queen Lady Di (Santoro) who towers over her "fiance", No Way (Camilo). They plan to marry if the HIV tests come back clear.

Babenco's patient and watchful approach pays off. When the climax comes, we know and care about all these oddballs and the riot sequence (which is more suggestive than explicit) is the more horrific as a result.

A magnificently operatic piece of work, the film at times recalls last year's fabulous City of God although it lacks that movie's magisterial control of multiple narratives. Nevertheless, it's a knockout, grand in scale and almost overwhelming in content. It is not to be approached casually, but it is strong and impressive.


CAST: Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, Milton Gonalves, Ivan de Almeida, Ailton Graa, Maria Luisa Mendona, Aida Leiner, Wagner Moura, Caio Blat, Rodrigo Santoro, Gero Camilo

DIRECTOR: Hector Babenco

RUNNING TIME: 145 mins

RATING: R16 (violence, sexual references)

SCREENING: Academy