A story of rebirth

Brazilian director Hector Babenco had always been known as an outsize personality, reveling in his role as a Hollywood outsider who has strafed the big studios with his maverick talents while luring some of America’s brightest stars -- Jack Nicholson, William Hurt, Meryl Streep -- even when he could pay almost nothing.

Now he was fighting for his life.

Latin America’s most distinguished film director was already seriously ill with non-Hodgkins lymphoma when he began filming “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” in the Amazon rain forest in 1990.

Babenco -- the father of Latin America’s gritty new wave of cinematic realism, whose “Pixote” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” are considered the predecessors of such films as “Amores Perros” and “City of God” -- would be forced to spend five years at home in Sao Paulo in the mid-1990s as he underwent chemotherapy.

He was attended by a dedicated oncologist, Drauzio Varella, who also turned out to be an accomplished storyteller, a “Scheherazade,” Babenco said. The doctor distracted Babenco with vivid accounts of the doctor’s volunteer work in Sao Paulo’s high-security House of Detention, known as Carandiru, a fantastic city-within-a-city where inmates redecorated their cells for conjugal visits with wives and paramours and prison transvestites married fellow convicts in frilly ceremonies.

Now Babenco has brought his doctor’s story to life, with “Carandiru,” an episodic chronicle of the complex emotional lives and struggles that led to the massacre of 111 inmates by prison guards in 1992. Babenco will appear at the Los Angeles premiere of the film May 12 at the Directors Guild of America, where “Carandiru” will kick off the Amnesty International Film Festival.

In a strange way, the stories of Carandiru helped bring Babenco himself back to life.

“I was without imagination, very psychologically oppressed by the years of illness. I was totally without goals, without fantasy, without libido,” said Babenco, 58, who has long been known for his deep passions for food and other sensual pleasures. “My self-esteem was very low. These stories were full of power, full of energy, full of fantasy.” To Babenco, the prison intrigues his doctor described had the magic quality of a Shakespearean play-within-a-play, enhanced by the fact that Latin American prisons often allow inmates greater freedom and mobility within prison walls.

“Latin American prisons are different,” Babenco said. “We are below the equator. We are not in Denmark. Some of the prisoners are happy. They dress in colorful ways. It is a totally different attitude than the other prison movies I’ve seen all my life, where prisons are silent and disciplined, and prisoners are a nameless number.

“I was attracted by these people who are not even viewed as human beings by many people,” Babenco said.

Outcasts have long fascinated Babenco, who sifts through the margins of society -- street orphans, homophobia-battered cross-dressers, punks -- and does not see strangers, but humanity and a mutual recognition.

For years Babenco pursued the film rights to “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a densely layered psychological thriller about the relationship between a political prisoner and a gay inmate ordered to win his confidence to get the names of his clandestine revolutionary comrades. Instead, the political prisoner transcends the stark brutality of his torture by retreating into the lush, fantastic tales told by his gay cellmate. They forge a deep bond, and when the gay cellmate leaves the prison, the doomed political prisoner admonishes him never to let anyone exploit him or treat him without respect, because “no one has the right to do that.”

The reluctant author of the novel, Manuel Puig, was an unrepentantly gay Argentine writer whose work had been banned by Peronist authorities for its irreverence, yet derided by the left for “frivolous” themes. Puig wrote “Kiss of the Spider Woman” after fleeing death threats in Argentina, in his off-hours from his job as an airline ticket clerk in New York City, while crashing at the apartment of Nestor Almendros, an Academy Award-winning Argentine cinematographer.

In those days, Puig was “dominated by the machos of Latin American literature,” Babenco said, his work dismissed as “gay trash, cheap literature.” Puig “was really a dictionary of American kitsch. He always knew what dress Ava Gardner was wearing. He loved melodrama and cheap novellas. He never got a lot of recognition among academics and reviewers.”

Puig did not want to sell the rights to Babenco at first because the director was not gay but relented after Burt Lancaster became attached: Puig “felt that he had some sexual ambiguity,” Babenco said. When Lancaster dropped out of the film with heart trouble, Raul Julia, who was cast as the political prisoner, suggested his friend William Hurt -- by then a major star -- to replace Lancaster as the gay prisoner, Babenco said. Julia and Hurt worked for no salary, only a percentage of the film’s profits, he said.

“It was impossible to get money in America for the movie,” Babenco said. “Nobody wanted to finance a movie about the relationship between a gay window dresser ... and a political prisoner.” A friend of Babenco’s loaned him $100,000, and others chipped in.

The role would win Hurt an Oscar for best actor in 1985 and elevate Puig’s stature worldwide. “Now people start to understand how he was using this popular language to understand the very important subject of the tragedy of ordinary life,” Babenco said.

True grit

Obscure yet epic tragedies are also at the heart of Babenco’s first international hit, 1981’s “Pixote,” about a band of homeless street urchins. The film cast a spotlight on the underbelly of Brazil’s economic boom -- hundreds of thousands of street children who are raped, brutalized and recruited for crime.

Babenco cast real street children in the film, with the pixieish star who played Pixote, Fernando Ramos da Silva, essentially playing himself. The film was not initially enthusiastically received in Brazil, but the picaresque portrayal of the lethally scampish Pixote opened hearts around the world. The boy became famous, and people came forward to offer Da Silva and other cast members jobs, with mixed results.

“One day [Da Silva] came to my office and said, ‘Hector, I can make in one night what it would take me a month of working to make. It’s not worth it,’ ” Babenco recalled. Da Silva drifted back to life on the streets. In 1987, Da Silva, then 19, was shot by police as he hid under a mattress.

When Babenco got the devastating news, he was in Los Angeles, immersed in the editing of “Ironweed,” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by William Kennedy. Set during the Depression, the film tells the story of a homeless man and woman, played by Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, who are pried away from ordinary lives by personal tragedy and thrown together in an alcohol-saturated romance of survival.

“I thought this was a big piece of Americana that was not painted by Norman Rockwell,” Babenco said. “I said, there is another America where there are real people who suffer and hold their pain.” The film was a critical success. In an interview published in the January issue of Playboy, Nicholson called “Ironweed” one of the best movies he’s ever done, even though it was not a commercial success, saying: “Some movies are jazz, some are rock ‘n’ roll.”

Babenco believes Americans may have trouble with the themes of despair and defeat that his films grapple with. “Americans don’t accept the tragedy of the ordinary life. Everyone has to be happy,” he said. “It’s better to feel the pain than to hide pain. You live life more the moment you face what is making you feel bad. You don’t have to be smiling all the time.”

The filmmaker grew up as something of an outsider himself, though in his case it was the prelude to a voluptuously rich life. Babenco is the Argentine-born son of European Jewish immigrants. He has described his father as a gambler and inveterate charmer who never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Babenco spent his childhood in Mar de Plata, a resort near Buenos Aires, and dropped out of school young, working as a door-to-door clothes salesman and later as a hotel bellhop, once carrying Fellini’s bags. He didn’t get much closer to cinematic glamour as a Europe bum, when he earned money as an extra in Italian spaghetti westerns.

When he returned to Argentina, he took a bus to Sao Paulo, drawn by the country’s film boom and fascinated by Brazil’s multiracial society. Brazilian cinema in those days was dominated by allegorical dramas, and Babenco distinguished himself with his noir brand of realism. However cool the initial Brazilian reception to “Pixote,” it became a hit around the world and marked a turning point not just in Babenco’s career, but in the direction of Brazilian cinema.

Babenco is now a naturalized Brazilian citizen. He has been married four times and has two daughters.

The seeds of “Carandiru” were planted at one of Babenco’s most vulnerable moments, a time when he was forced to come to terms with his own mortality and the finite possibilities of life.

As his disease worsened, Varella recommended the difficult bone-marrow transplant, performed in Seattle, that would save Babenco’s life and send his disease into remission. The treatment left Babenco sick in bed at home, weak and fatigued, his hair falling out, his skin peeling off.

Varella was immersed in another kind of transforming personal odyssey, running a volunteer clinic at Carandiru, seeing up to 60 patients a week, from 1989 on.

“He used to call me every night to see how I was feeling, and tell me stories of what he was seeing and hearing in Carandiru,” Babenco said. “He had a need to share this other reality that he was learning about with someone who had already visited this universe. I was very enchanted to see a serious doctor, who deals with death and cancer, so surprised and excited as he was telling me the stories he heard in an improvised clinic in a corner of Carandiru.”

Varella began to fax Babenco some of his accounts. “When I entered the prison I was so overwhelmed by the environment, the tension,” Varella said. “The prison was like a city of its own.”

You should really write a book, Babenco told Varella. The doctor eventually did, and when the book became a bestseller, “I felt like a silent partner,” Babenco said.

But before Babenco made “Carandiru,” he directed a film he thought would be his last, a semiautobiographical drama called “Foolish Heart,” about a man’s quest to reconnect with his first love. He had two viable stars, Willem Dafoe and Nastassja Kinski, lined up for a film, but he ultimately decided to shoot the film in Spanish and cast regional actors, including his then-wife, Brazilian actress Xuxa Lopes. “Foolish Heart” flopped. Babenco and Lopes later divorced. His wife today, Christiana Carvalho, was a globe-trotting nature photographer when they met, but now, she says, “I just take care of him. I keep him sane.”

“Carandiru” was more successful. Babenco cast a Brazilian soap opera actor who is a popular male romantic lead in the role of a transvestite. Some of the most haunting scenes are shot in Carandiru itself, before the notorious prison was torn down in 2002 to make way for a park. The film cost $4 million, and in its first month of release last year it set a national record in Brazil, with 3 million moviegoers.

At the Los Angeles festival, Babenco will be honored for his work with the 2004 Artists for Amnesty Award.

“I feel extremely thankful, but to tell you the truth, this was a big surprise. I’ve never been a militant,” he said. “I’m really an anarchist in the old-fashioned way. You can judge my vision in the movies I’ve done.”

Babenco is excited by the quality of contemporary Hollywood cinema and can quickly rattle off any number of films -- “Mystic River,” “21 Grams,” “Magnolia,” “Boogie Nights,” “Clerks” and other Kevin Smith films -- that he admires.

“I love Hollywood movies. I grew up watching Hollywood movies,” he said. “There are great movies being made and a lot of junk. But there is a market for junk too.”

Babenco can’t tell you what drives his own undistilled vision. “It’s like asking a painter why he paints in such a way. If he knew, he probably wouldn’t paint.”

Telling stories in film “is what I decided to do in life, to keep alive, and to tell people who I am,” he said. “This is very ancestral, the need certain human beings have to tell something to one another. The natives at night gather around the fire to tell one another stories.

“I believe entertainment can be a very intelligent weapon.”

Staff researcher Robin Mayper contributed to this story