CS Weekly Archive > Weekend Read > 05/26/04

Prison Held Captive by Patchwork Storytelling

By yon motskin

Based on the best-selling Brazilian book, Carandiru is a horrific portrait of the notorious Sao Paulo prison. It's a difficult film to watch, not just for the violence and brutality, but also because of its lengthy and sometimes unfocused storytelling.

Carandiru
In Portugese, with English subtitles

Hector Babenco (also director), Victor Navas, Fernando Bonassi
Based on the book Carandiru Station (Estacao Carandiru) by Drauzio Varella

Through the eyes and ears of a volunteer Doctor (Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos), Carandiru tells the final chapter of a real-life prison -- as well as its inmates and the unique, internal code of conduct they follow to survive -- in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where AIDS and violence is rampant. Zico (Wagner Moura) and Duesdete (Caio Blat) are adopted brothers whose kinship comes to a tragic end. Highness (Ailton Graca) is a gleeful man who balances two feuding wives. Dagger (Milhem Cortaz) is a frightening multiple-convict who finds redemption in religion. No Way (Gero Camilo) and cross-dressing Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro) are two men who overcome the odds to become a curious couple. These are just a few of the more than dozen main characters followed to paint a complex portrait of discipline, disease, and, ultimately, destruction.

Carandiru is a difficult, taxing movie. Not unlike the recent City of God, it depicts a primitive, unrelenting violence through a patchwork of characters woven in and out of the narrative. Unlike Fernando Mereilles' excellent film, which used mindless kids as protagonists and stylization as a buffer, the documentary-like bloodshed in Carandiru, committed by frustrated, jealous, or vengeful adults, is often motivated and bears consequence -- therefore, it goes down easier. For example, when Deusdete kills a man after his sister is abused, we forgive him. When Zico is chopped and diced up after senselessly killing someone else, we understand. Though these characters die a gruesome, graphic death, the writers have established the film's main throughline early: despite its disease-infested and overcrowded structure, this unorthodox penitentiary has an internal hierarchy and moral code that must be followed -- debts must be repaid; personal property (including wives) must be respected; permission to kill must be requested from an elder. As the saying goes, you live by the code, you die by the code.

There is, however, a major storytelling problem: despite valiant efforts, it's difficult to emotionally invest in the central protagonist, since it is an inanimate object -- the prison. There are too many people and not enough quality time spent with them. The Doctor, the main human around whom the script is structured, acts as the viewer's guide into the lives of each character, but our glimpses into said pre-prison lives (via flashback) are so brief that we don't have time to invest anything in their plight. Nor do we care much about the affable Doctor, who readily answers heavy-handed questions like "Is there a cure for guilt?"

Despite an admirable job of trimming down the book's hundreds of characters into a few dozen, Babenco's script still casts too wide a net to allow the audience to commit their emotions. The dialogue is often morally heavy-handed, a quality that diminishes the otherwise compelling melodrama.

Carandiru
Sony Pictures Classics
Rated R;, 148 min.

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Writer-director Yon Motskin is a recent graduate of the New York University film program. He is currently in preproduction on his first feature, Cutman, a dark boxing drama based on his award-winning short, which premiered at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and will screen at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.

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