Review of Carandiru (2003) by Shiraz C — 17 Dec 2007

A bit drawn out and unhelpfully comic at times, this is still an astonishing story (based on true events) of a hugely overcrowded prison in Sao Paulo that is largely run by the prisoners themselves. The Panoptican prison this is not, no all seeing guards checking the minute behaviour of each inmate.

The relative calm of this prison (where the order is rarely disturbed, even if the order sanctions drug-taking, drug-dealing and the occasional murder) is down to the collective realisation that doing your time with relatively minimal fuss is the best way out of the prison.

The film is structured by a doctor coming to the prison as part of an HIV awareness and testing programme. As the doctor meets and sympathises with the psychopaths, casual murderers, drug takers, slum dwellers and general low-lifers in his prison surgery, so do we.

But the tales are hardly revealing as we usually get a rose-tinted view of the criminals' actions that led to their time in jail. The prominence of the gay and transgender community in Carandinu attempts to suggest that love is as much a uniting force for the inmates as sex, drugs, and just coping; but once again it come across as camp rather than enabling us to get under the prisoners' skin.

For nearly two hours we get a messy patchwork of the characters until the event that the film is building up to, the massacre, starts. And the 1992 massacre is brought to the screen with visceral energy, uncovering the brutality of the white riot police and intimating that there is blood on the hands of Sao Paulo's governor.

It is just a shame the director, Babenco, didn't shorten this film by an hour and cut the number of people we meet by a tenth.