Up close, in a teeming prison

Hector Babenco, the Argentine-born director celebrated for such intimate portraits of Latin American prison life as Pixote and Kiss of the Spider Woman, may be the only man alive who finds jail liberating.

His searing and hypnotic docudrama Carandiru is a fly-on-the-wall account of the notorious Sao Paulo House of Detention that housed 8,000 men in a decaying complex designed for only 3,000. In 1992, when the state police intervened in a prison riot, Carandiru became as infamous as the New York penal institution Attica.

Based on the memoirs of Dráuzio Varella, a physician who brought AIDS awareness and condoms to this metropolis of murderers and muggers, the film drops us into the most inhuman environment imaginable. Its achievement is to see beyond the encrustations of blood and excrement and find the humanity among some of the dozen or so inmates whose stories - and destinies - converge.

As the doctor, Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos listens to the vivid tales of the men in the cellblock, stories that invariably paint the inmates as falsely accused, if not entirely innocent. One prisoner arouses the fury of another, who recognizes his fellow inmate as the man who killed his father.

A statesmanlike elder inmate (Ivan de Almeida) puts the brakes on their mortal combat. He patiently explains to the aggrieved man that since his mother contracted the hit man to kill his father, the hit man should not be held personally responsible for the crime.

This elder, known by a nickname that is a racial slur, functions as the cellblock godfather, judge and jury. His power derives from the network of uneasy alliances he has forged. Like the one about the patients taking over the asylum, Carandiru is one about the inmates running the prison.

Those with juice live in relative splendor, in roomy cells with beds and private televisions. Those who cannot stomach prison politics and violence are crowded like cockroaches in the "coward's wing"; they merely subsist. For those who cower in the coward's wing, quality of life matters not; life does.

As each patient tells the doctor how he came to be in Carandiru, the movie escapes prison for a back-story flashback. It turns out that many of the prisoners were friends or conspirators on the outside, and we begin to see the penitentiary as a surreal mirror image of their Sao Paulo folkways.

There are the bank robbers who fell out over one's faithless spouse and who share a moving behind-bars reconciliation. And then there are the boys raised as siblings whose brotherhood cannot protect them from prison politics. At Carandiru, murder is deemed business as usual, but rape is treated as a crime.

In the through-the-looking-glass world of Carandiru, the least sympathetic character is also the most charismatic. In a tour-de-force performance, Ailton Graça plays "Highness," a bigamous drug dealer who juggles wives, children and fall guys with grace and humor.

It takes his Highness' wiles to survive Carandiru. What's powerful about Babenco's 2 1/2-hour epic is how subtly the audience's loyalties shift. At first revulsed by the sordid spectacle, we come to care deeply about the inmates Babenco so patiently and lovingly humanizes. So when the state police storm the fortress, the powerful effect is that of losing brothers-in-arms.

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or cricket@phillynews.com.

Read her recent work at http://go.philly.com/carrierickey.

Carandiru

*** (out of four stars)

Produced and directed by Hector Babenco, written by Victor Navas, Babenco and Fernando Bonassi, based on the memoir Carandiru Station by Dráuzio Varella, photography by Walter Carvalho, distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Running time: 2 hours, 25 mins.

Physician. . . Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos

Seo Chico. . . Milton Gonçalves

Highness. . . Ailton Graça

Ezequiel. . . Lázaro Ramos

Lady Di. . . . . . Rodrigo Santoro

Parent's guide: R (nudity, sex, extreme violence, drugs)

Playing at: Ritz East and Ritz Sixteen/NJ