Hey folks, Harry here... Seems that we've got a trio of Galaxy Rangers from Brazil, the land of lovely women and a passion for life... To share with us their look and love of film. Their first helping is of a film called CARANDIRU, which... while ultimately not completely satisfying to the man god known as KAS, it certainly seems to have quite a bit on its mind and sounds like something I'd like to see. Beware of some spoilers, here ya go...
Dear Harry and Moriarty,
We are just starting our own website: A Galáxia (or The Galaxy) – www.agalaxia.com.br. We’ll pretty much be talking about movies and comic books and we hope to put AICN to shame! MURAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It’s not running yet but we hope it will be sooner this week. In the meantime, we did a review on Hector Babenco’s latest film, “Carandiru” about the old Brazilian prison of the same name (which it was condemned and imploded by the government a few months ago). I apologize for any spelling mistakes and typos and we did not translated the character’s names because we still don’t know how they will be called in the US. Feel free to edit it in any way you guys see fit. In the meantime, call us KAS, CACO and GELOGURTE, the Galaxy Rangers!
CARANDIRU REVIEW
In the first scene of “Carandiru”, a convict threatens to kill another convict saying he killed his father. The accused admits to this crime but at the same time say that things are not as it seems. All this mess is supervised by Nego Preto (the excellent Ivan de Almeida), a thief and occasional murderer (as most con man in this movie) who is responsible for some order in the chaos that is life in Carandiru. This very tense scene is filmed behind bars and is watched by Dr Dráuzio Varella in his first day of work in an anti-HIV campaign in the prison.
Varella tells his experience in the best seller “Estação Carandiru” (150 weeks in the list of Best Sellers of Brazil and will probably sell even more after the movie is released), a gathering of short stories witnessed by the doctor who made them a powerful portrait of life in prison.
When Hector Babenco, an old patient of Dráuzio Varella read the first draft written by the doctor, he got fascinated with the humanity Varella was able to put in the convicts, criminals doomed to pass a good time of their lives in jail, sometimes because of terrible and violent crimes, sometimes because of some petty transgression. Surprisingly, the filmmaker told the doctor/writer that that would be his next movie. When we first heard about Babenco was making “Carandiru”, we fell sorry for “City of God”. So, you can have an idea what’s this movie could be.
Babenco is fascinated by outcasts stories. Since his first movie, “King of the Night” (1975), the director shows fascination – and especially compassion – for the main characters who live marginalized. In “Lucio Flávio, Passenger of Agony” (1977), Babenco translates to screens the true story of the famous criminal, putting a lot of weight in the lawbreaking persona of the character. In “Pixote – The Law of the Weakest” (1981) that revealed Babenco internationally; he shows with tenderness and violence the world of homeless kids and prostitutes. In “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (no relation to comics you dirty geeks!), the main characters are cellmates – a homosexual and a political prisoner – in a South American jail. The movie opened doors in Hollywood for Babenco. In his next film, “Ironweed” (1987), Hector Babenco uses Hollywood’s funding and actors Jack Nicholson e Meryl Streep, both Academy Awards nominated for this movie, to make an intimate portrait of the victims of the great depression. Nicholson plays an alcoholic who is tormented by ghosts of his past, among them his own son who died when he, when drunken, dropped him. The hard and depressing movie tanked at the American Box Office and was unfairly bombed by some critics. But that didn’t stopped him to once again show the marginalized character in “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” (1991). Tom Berenger plays Lewis Moon, an airplane pilot descendant from Native American who identifies himself with an Amazon Indian tribe. He gets to the point that he questions his own identity and return to his Indian roots. But soon the whole tribe starts dying of an epidemic flu when they have contact with American missionaries. Moon will again find himself lost. This vigorous and underestimated film also has John Lithgow, Kathy Bates, Aidan Quinn, Daryl Hannah and Tom Waits in it’s cast, and it also not did so well at the box office. That was the final drop to break Babenco’s connection with the American cinema. Between “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” and the extremely beautiful “Foolish Heart” (1998), the director fought a liver cancer that nearly killed him but connected him with “Carandiru”.
Besides the obvious dramatic possibilities that these marginalized characters allow, Babenco’s identification with the subject allows other interpretations, closer to his condition of “a Brazilian and a citizen of the world” to put it in his own words. A Jewish son, born in Argentina, which he left to work in Italy as an Assistant Producer and to where he was forbidden to go back for not serving in the Army, the filmmaker found his refuge in Brazil and became got Brazilian citizenship. But he was never really accepted by his fellow artists and the media itself. When “Central Station” got nominated for an Oscar in 1999, the Brazilian Press could not shut up about it, saying it was an historical fact by Walter Salles and Fernanda Montenegro. Few remember that back in 1985, when things were much harder on Brazilian Cinema, Hector Babenco got four Oscar nominations for “Kiss of the Spider Woman”. And not just technical awards but Best Picture, Director, Screenplay and Actor (for William Hurt). So the movie was not thrown in the Best Foreign Film “Ghetto” but judged as an equal to the nominees of that year, like “Out of Africa”, “Prizzi’s Honor” and “The Color Purple”. Even though it was financed and made by a Brazilian crew, the Brazilian press never considered “Kiss of the Spider Woman” a Brazilian movie just because it was made in an English language and with an American actor in the lead role. Nobody accused mediocre films like “Bossa Nova” (starring Amy Irving) and “Bela Donna” (Natasha Henstridge and Andrew McCarthy) of not being Brazilian films for the same reasons. When he released the compelling “Foolish Heart” the director got a cold reception from the critics and a very small audience. So it makes total sense for his next project being “Carandiru”, all things considered.
Translating Varella’s book to the screens may seem daring, specially because the film doesn’t have what you might call an actual story. It’s in fact several stories told by the doctor or lived by him in the time he worked at the prison. On the other hand, this is a universe Babenco knows quite well and remarkably showed in “Lucio Flavio” and “Pixote”. At the same time, it’s a very popular book that, the press liking it or not, would call the audience’s attention when translated to screen. But it leaves that strange taste that the director may have found there the chance to reunite with success and the critics respect as well. Then, it ceases to be a risk and starts being a safe spot in the filmmaker’s career.
This sense of safety is the biggest problem in “Carandiru”. Babenco makes it clear that he did not let himself be challenged by this project and trails the safer and less fascinating road and, exactly what we don’t expect from this kind of director. The movie is very faithful to some parts of the book and some times creates completely new ones and does the same with characters. And it does it in the most common unimaginative way. The result is a collection of what we might think of who a convict is by watching other films: the thief with a good heart that doesn’t want his kids to follow the path he trailed, the drug dealer with two wives, the cold blooded killer that goes trough a conscience crisis, the childhood friends that will turn on each other in prison, the criminal who is the prison’s cook and mediator, the travesty (“Behind the Sun’s” Rodrigo Santoro, who will be seen this summer in “Charlie’s Angels 2”) and the thief who fall in love. All those stories are thrown at the screen in kind of a lazy way, even though the cast tries really hard to lend some humanity to their roles. The one who suffers the most is the main character himself, Dr Dráuzio Varella (played by a sub used Luis Carlos Vasconcelos, who’s also in Walter Salles’ “Behind the Sun”). In opposite to the book where he is constantly changed by the stories and situations, in the movie he is merely a watcher, with no relation with what happens around him. The audience shares that apathy. “Carandiru”, although is very carefully produced, ends up being burocratic and mediocre, it doesn’t ad much to the audience. And that’s too little for such a great director as Hector Babenco.
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KAS (Carlos Quintão) who reviewed
GELOGURTE (Heitor Valaḍo Рsorry for the typos!) who translated
CACO (Ricardo Sousa) who did nothing but complained
