E-Mail This Article to a Friend CARANDIRU

HeHector Babenco (Pixote) directed this earnest but bland account of the lives of the denizens of a Brazilian prison during the weeks before armed security forces, responding to a prisoner uprising, overran the place and massacred the inmates. Saving this incident, which took place in 1982, for the climax, Babenco spends much of the film concentrating on the life stories of several prisoners, letting each trace the causes of his incarceration in a lengthy flashback that’s prefaced with some line like "You know, doctor, one day my mother didn’t come home . . . " He no doubt intended to widen the scope of Carandiru, making it a panoramic study of Brazil’s criminal underclass, but the flashback structure diffuses the film, making it hard to stay interested in any of the characters as individuals or get a clear sense of the society they form in prison. And since the director makes little effort to locate the prisoners’ stories within the larger context of political oppression and militarism, the massacre, when it comes, comes out of nowhere, evoking inevitable shock and awe but leading to no insight. In Portuguese with English subtitles. (146 minutes)