Carandiru Hector Babenco Brazil 2003
In the wake of City of God, another liberal wake-up call for Brazil’s well-heeled middle-classes reaches us in Europe, Hector Babenco’s Carandiru. Far from the heritage sop folksy Brazil of the North-West seen in Behind the Sun or soon in The Three Marias, the Argentinean-born director’s film is a chilling exposé of the seething plight of the lowest of Brazil’s vast underclass, those languishing within its shambolic prison system, as exemplified by the true story of the Carandiru Detention Centre, the biggest and most overcrowded of its time in Latin America. Built in a Brutalist 50s style and dilapidated by 40 odd years of ill-maintenance and overcrowding (the prison contained at least double its recommended capacity), Babenco’s film lands the viewer in the midst of Carandiru and its incarcerated society, drawn from the wretched, wicked or simply unfortunate of Brazil, in 1992 some months before the infamous events of that year.
The film follows Dr Draúzio Varella as he sets up an AIDS-prevention programme in the prison, wherein drug-taking and unprotected sex are rife. For the first two-thirds of the film, Varella beholds in wonder, like a Victorian ethnographer exposed to an unknown civilization, a stationary Gulliver listening to the laws, lore and lives of the prisoners who almost govern themselves within the policed perimeter fence. A Benthamite dream come true, for a time. Enshrouded in the ineffable sprawl of São Paulo, Carandiru is almost like an autonomous enclave, a South African puppet republic. The prison authorities limit themselves almost exclusively to keeping the prisoners behind bars and crushing any revolt. For the rest the prisoners organise their own society, dividing the prison up into neighbourhoods, charging new inmates for room and board depending on the quality of their billeting. Incredible are the open-days, in which the wives and wider families of the inmates are allowed in to visit and are given the run of the prison.
As Varella encounters the prisoners in his surgery, with the slightest soliciting each recounts their stories to him (which we see in a series of flashbacks) in an amazingly forthcoming and un-aggressive way. Presumably in the memoirs of the real life Varella the film is based on, the doctor, of whom Babenco is a patient and friend, attempts to be an impartial, even non-judgemental auditor, effacing himself before his patients’ stories. Yet in the film this causes his character to come across as oddly untouched by all that he sees and hears. It is through the doctor that the viewer’s attention is focussed, and I found this aloofness had the effect of contaminating me with his doctorly ability to treat patients as cases. Despite this effect, the inmates’ stories remain powerful stuff. Many of those whose stories we hear have committed the most atrocious of crimes, yet in all of them the social crime of an injustice-riven society like Brazil’s is overwhelming. Now physically incarcerated, most of the inmates have been entrapped in their lives for their whole existence. But if their lives have been prisons, conversely, in Carandiru, the society they have fashioned is itself a crystallised reflection of their lives. The population, like that of the Favelas they are shown to have come from in their flashbacks, seems roughly divided between criminality (especially drug-taking and trafficking), Evangelical Christianity and football. The only justice they find is their own, the crude law of the streets, shot through with Latin notions of honour and machismo, a complex, tacit system of rights, rules, duties and punishments. And, as within Brazil’s troubled but incredibly vibrant society, there are glimmers of happiness, humanity and hope for the future.
Babenco (Kiss of the Spiderwomen, Pixote) gets the best of his cast, most of whom will be recognisable to those who have followed the Brazilian films increasingly making their way onto British screens. The doctor (played by Luiz Carlos Vasconcellos, also seen in Behind the Sun, Me You Them), permanently beaming in fascination at the strange fauna he encounters in the prison is played competently. Plaudits though must go to Rodrigo Santoro (Behind the Sun, and, erm, Love Actually) Brazil’s foremost matinee idol, a Brazilian version of Brad Pitt say, who plays the flamboyant transvestite Lady Di, complete with breast implants and a dream marriage, sealed with a long, loving kiss, to the doctor’s diminutive assistant, named No Chance. But who is a very lucky man indeed, I’d say. Visually, Carandiru has something of the favela of City of God, with its mix of warm and cold colours, its utter dinginess, mitigated by moments of bright, vibrant life quickly quelled by despair and squalor, but never entirely extinguished.
Shot in a heavy, dark, claustrophobic style, the final third of the film relates the story of the pitched riots that broke out and spiralled into an out and out revolt, born of the prisoner’s pent-up frustrations, and the vicious, implacable response of the assault police sent in to put down the rebellion. Which they did, as though it were a dog: 110 prisoners shot dead to no police casualties. The biggest police massacre ever. It is important to remember that Carandiru was a detention centre, not just a prison and that many of its detainees were just waiting to be brought to trial, awaiting the results of appeals. Some, technically free, were just waiting for the bureaucratic wheels to turn and their release to be processed: for years, A purgatory, in short. With the police attack, however, Carandiru turns into a veritable hell on earth. Amidst the smoke and screaming, the blood running down the corridors and stairwells, the sadistic police stalk the compound, executing prisoners at will. Whilst harrowing, and effective, this section is done heavy-handedly, as when one stricken inmate falls against a wire partition with his hands outstretched in a crucifix position.
Following this reconstruction, we hear the surviving characters take on events, in a documentary, interview-style interlude. Brazil is a country in which the voices heard on the state of society, especially at the time of the Carandiru massacre when, only a few years after emerging from the grip of a military dictatorship and still in the throes of the corrupt, Reaganite government of Fernando Collor, were official ones, which led people to believe that the favelados of Brazil were dangerous animals. The written information that scrolls up at the end of the film declares, only God the Police and the Prisoners know what happened in Carandiru. For a long time, Brazil only heard the police. In Carandiru, we get to hear the prisoners’ version of events, albeit from Varela/Babenco’s sympathetic standpoint.
