Singing in the Cells.(Carandiru)(Movie Review)

Midway through "Carandiru," Hector Babenco's new feature film about Brazil's most hellish prison, inmates stand in soldierly rows around the jail yard. They are gathered for a football game, and soon the Brazilian national anthem crackles over the loudspeakers. By rights, these callous cons ought to be scoffing at every strophe. Instead they are reverent as choirboys. Thieves, thugs and murderers, to a man they clap their hands to their hearts and sing.

This is a delicate moment, one of many in "Carandiru." Yet Carandiru is far from a delicate place. Until it was demolished last December, this was Brazil's blackest hole, where 7,000 felons lived in unspeakable conditions. And yet somehow Babenco captures this demimonde with a subtle, even tender eye, and so seduces us into looking when all we want is to turn away.

The film is a faithful rendering of Estaco Carandiru (Station Carandiru), a nonfiction book by Drauzio Varella, a physician who treated prisoners for AIDS in the 1980s--and who Babenco credits with saving him from cancer. No wonder "Carandiru" plays like a paean to survival. Like the book, this is a big, disjointed picture with no protagonist, only individual tales of desperation, hope, vanity and vendetta. There's the fish-eyed mass murderer who has nothing left to lose except his cachet as a killer. There's a penny-ante Romeo, a prisoner of hype and hormones. And Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro), the doe- eyed transvestite with a cantilevered bosom and an athletic love life ("How many partners?" asks the doctor. "Oh, around 2,000," Lady says with a shrug.) Compressed in their concrete chambers, these men mingle and collide like ...