Disorderly behaviour

For those of us who thrilled to the exploits of the homicidal slum- dwellers featured in Fernando Meirelles's City of God, Carandiru promises the flip side: what happens to these Brazilian badfellas when they've been caught for the crime and have to do their time?

Carandiru was the largest prison in Brazil, a grisly series of 1950s concrete blocks on the outskirts of the megalopolis of S"o Paulo, which, by the early 1990s, were home to more than 7,000 inmates, over twice the number they were designed for.

The jail was pretty much what you might expect: a hellish analogue of the favellas that most of the criminals had emerged from. Drug dealing, male prostitution, illegal distilling, turf wars and protection rackets were the order of the day. Murders were frequent and, due to a combination of indifference and undermanning, the prisoners were left - as in most Brazilian jails - to enforce their own savage hierarchies.

Yet Carandiru had a form of civil society as well. Cells were for rent, marriages between transvestites and their protectors were sanctified, and there was an economy of sorts, even if its principle commodities were crack cocaine and marijuana.

If an inmate had nowhere else to run he could always go to the "yellow block", where he could relapse into the darkness of convicted sex-offenders and policeinformers. Into this community came a doctor, Drauzio Varella, who was intent on doing an epidemiological study of HIV in Brazilian prisons - the first of its kind.

Lured in by science, Varella was hooked by humanity, and worked voluntarily at the jail over a number of years. By coincidence, he also treated Hector Babenco for Hodgkinson's Lymphoma at this time, and told the film director anecdotes about the jail. Babenco encouraged Varella to write them down, and this became the best-selling book Carandiru Station, which has now, in turn, been adapted for film by Babenco.

The director kicked off his career with the gruelling social realism of Pixote, set among the slum kids of S"o Paolo, but went on to make other films, the most memorable of which, Kiss of the Spider Woman, gave William Hurt the opportunity for a drag act, a peculiar piece of casting against type that yet paid off (a little).

Sadly, Babenco's later films have tended towards ponderousness, as if his particularly rootless Latin American vision (his parents were Jewish immigrants, but he was raised in Argentina and then became a naturalised Brazilian) couldn't quite synergise with Hollywood.

Carandiru is a return to the pullulating underclass of Brazil that gave Babenco his strongest vision, but while the film has many excellent moments, I fear that it is less than the sum of its parts. Certainly, after the Danny Boy le - i n f luenced sambatography of Meirelles, Babenco's vision is a more staid affair. His camera tunnels through the jail, using the rusting steel doors as frames, introducing us to these cubicular lives. Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos plays the Physician, an unnamed proxy for Varella, and it is mostly through his eyes that we meet the Carandiru crew.

THEY'RE a colourful lot: Lady Di, the transvestite prostitute with a passing resemblance to "her" namesake; No Way, her crack-smoking, dwarfish medical-orderly lover; Ebony, the cell-block boss, troubled by businessman's stress; Highness, the polygamous drug-dealer with one beautiful black wife, and one white; Zico and Deusdete, two star-crossed foster brothers.