The Unlikely Lambs

Movie-goers familiar with the tides of recent Brazilian history will probably get more from Hector Babenco's new prison movie, Carandiru, than the rest of us, because the filmmaker tells us so little about the society beyond the walls that helped shape the violent yet carefully ordered world within them. On the other hand, this is a deeply engaged citizen/artist at work, the same director who took us inside a Brazilian juvenile facility in 1981's memorable Pixote, drew a stark portrait of a jailhouse murder in Lucio Flavio and explored the tender, uncertain truce between a gay inmate and a straight one in his American-made Kiss of the Spider Woman. When the cell door clangs shut, Babenco thrives. We get an authentic jolt of life behind bars and a look at the compromises men make for survival.

What we see here in the early 1990s inside Carandiru prison -- the infamous São Paulo detention center where 7,500 men were regularly crammed into cell blocks designed for 3,000 -- is an elaborate social structure, as weirdly elegant as it is Darwinian, in which the weak are cast aside (or cared for) by the strong; inmate leaders wield more power than the penal administrators; and the pecking order determines everything from the availability of designer wall hangings, private TV sets or crack cocaine to the denial of a few square feet in which to curl up and grab a private gulp of air. This form of self-governance may seem coldhearted. But compared to, say, the bloody totalitarianism by which inmate gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood now rule many American penitentiaries, it looks oddly rational, with a lot of room for stolen comforts and secret pleasures. Inmate law prevails, but this brand of inmate law respects the varieties of inmate need.

In tone and texture, Carandiru falls somewhere between the brutal reality of the cable-TV prison series Oz and the romanticized fantasy of The Shawshank Redemption, and that middle ground reflects not only Babenco's obsession with careful, almost theatrical character development, but also the 1999 book from which the film was adapted. The Brazilian best-seller Carandiru Station was written by Drauzio Varella, a prison doctor who worked part-time inside the detention center for fourteen years, getting to know the inmates and, if we can believe him, gaining their confidence as physician, confessor and friend. The same irksome note of self-congratulation that characterizes Varella's memoir seeps into the movie (as played by Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos, the good doc remains invariably wise and patient throughout), and it's easy to suspect the author of self-service, despite his noble battles against AIDS, TB and scabies.

Nonetheless, the film's inmate portraits are vivid, well-rounded and, in some cases, surprisingly witty. As Carandiru winds on (for 145 minutes, you may want to know) toward a tragic conclusion that crushes our notions of a prison society that, for its own purposes, works, we come to care deeply about these imprisoned men -- not least because we also get flashback glimpses of their previous lives and the crimes they committed. Among the dramatis personae: round-faced old Chico (Milton Goncalves), who patiently awaits a visit from his daughter and dreams of flying off in a balloon; the tough, macho Highness (Ailton Graca), whose appetites on the outside included two feuding wives and two separate families; florid Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro); and tiny No Way (Gero Camilo), whose gay romance is not only accepted inside Carandiru, but celebrated as a sign of civility preserved. There's the doomed drug dealer Zico (Wagner Moura), whose crack supply gets the best of him, and a pair of fastidious middle-class bank robbers (Floriana Peixoto and Ricardo Blat) who ran afoul of the law only because one suspects his wife of infidelity. Best of all is Dagger (Milhem Cortaz), a lifelong killer who, in a sudden revelation of self, refuses to stab a fellow inmate. The sad, foolish stories of these lives, past and present, fold together with a kind of cruel beauty.