Nobody pushes Hector Babenco around. The 57-year-old Argentine-born Brazilian didn’t get to be Latin America’s best-known filmmaker by taking a lot of direction. In 30 years he has directed eight feature films, winning praise, prizes, good money and the odd Bronx cheer, but always by doing things the way he wanted.
Babenco built his resume as a consummate outsider, the Latin party crasher who muscled his way onto the brightest marquees by thumbing his nose at the major Hollywood studios. More remarkably, he has done so telling tales about punks and prisoners, street kids and transvestites–the sort of riffraff who gave studio moguls the willies back when Babenco was starting out, but who are now all the rage in the new wave of Latin cinema. He has consistently lured some of the most coveted stars–Jack Nicholson, William Hurt, Meryl Streep, Raul Julia, Kathy Bates–to high-risk projects, at times paying next to nothing. How? “He’s completely dedicated and totally honest,” says Nicholson, who played a beggar in Babenco’s “Ironweed.” “Hector has vision.”
At times Babenco resembles Francis, Nicholson’s stubborn philosopher-bum in “Ironweed,” who hurls bottles at the moon. But Babenco’s art is driven by more than quixotic anger. He has made his mark by taking audiences to the tattered edge of society: to the streets, the jails and the sweaty jungle, “the place where God farted,” as one Matthiessen character puts it. Then just as you brace yourself for a bloodbath he pulls back, leavening the tale with a flicker of hope or compassion, as when a prostitute gathers the broken street waif Pixote in her arms like the Pieta in “Pixote, the Law of the Weakest.” “What’s important to Hector is the high drama,” says William Kennedy, who wrote the novel and screenplay for “Ironweed.” “Below that there’s brutal, vivid realism.”
Thanks largely to Babenco’s influence, that realism has become the hallmark of Latin America’s new generation of filmmakers. Nowadays every young Latin director worth his folding chair plumps his cast with misfits and renegades from the felonious alleys or the tubercular jails. Movie houses from Tijuana to Santiago are playing titles from this bruising new genre, including Alejandro Inarritu’s “Amores Perros,” about love and death in Mexico City; Beto Brant’s “O Invasor,” about a hired murderer who turns on his patron, and “City of God,” Fernando Meirelles’s Brazilian gangland picture. Even the gentler, more intimate films–“Nine Queens,” the sexy romp “Y Tu Mama Tambien”–take their cues from the streets. Babenco was mining this vein a quarter century ago, when most Latin filmmakers were still enamored of brainy black-and-white art-house fare. With “Carandiru,” –set in Latin America’s biggest prison, he’s still setting the pace. “It’s disturbing and touching at the same time,” says Julian Schnabel, the New York filmmaker and painter. “There is something irrefutably urgent about Babenco’s work.”
Babenco knows something about urgency. The son of a Polish-Jewish salesman from Mar del Plata, a resort town near Buenos Aires, he dropped out of high school to hawk clothes door to door and never went to college. His one brush with movie glamour back then was as a hotel bellhop, when he once carried Francois Truffaut’s red suitcase. At 18 he fled the draft and headed for Europe, where he drifted for five years, working as an extra in spaghetti Westerns.
When he returned, Babenco boarded a bus to So Paulo. Many urbane Argentines looked askance at raucous, multiracial Brazil at that time, but Babenco was fascinated. “There were black people, lights, colors everywhere,” he says. “It was like going from a Strindberg play right to Carnival.” To get by, he worked odd jobs, selling gravestones and taking snapshots of restaurant patrons. But he wanted more. “My father was a compulsive gambler and a liar, but had a tremendous gift for telling stories,” he says. “I wanted to tell beautiful lies.”
That was the early 1970s, when Brazil was still basking in Cinema Novo, the bold movement in which intellectuals like Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos set out to reinvent filmmaking with their high-minded allegories and jittery handheld cameras. “They were some of the best movies I ever saw,” Babenco says. But the Brazilian cineastes had little use for beginners. “Babenco was badly treated by the cinema establishment,” says Arnaldo Jabor, one of the early disciples of Cinema Novo. “No one gave him the time of day.”
Babenco’s response was to turn the esthetic on its head. “People were tired of allegory,” he says. “I decided to tell stories about Brazil.” After two budget noir films, he finally hit it big in 1980 with “Pixote,” the story of a So Paulo orphan who robs and murders his way to adulthood. Many Brazilian critics were lukewarm. But au-diences had never seen anything like it.
In time “Pixote” became a classic, the first tendril of a budding Latin American neorealism. Awards piled in. On a roll, Babenco talked the famously reticent Argentine author Manuel Puig into letting him shoot Puig’s celebrated novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and signed Raul Julia and William Hurt, who worked “for nothing!” Babenco exclaims, except a share of the movie’s revenues. Hurt won the Oscar for best actor in 1985. Suddenly Babenco found himself in a seller’s market.
That’s when he met William Kennedy. As it happened, Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Ironweed” was the first book Babenco had ever read in English. But to the director, the tale–about street people in Depression-era Albany, New York–needed no translation. Babenco picked up the phone and made his pitch to Kennedy–even though someone else already held the movie rights. The two met for lunch in New York, where Babenco invited Kennedy to a screening of “Spider Woman.” “I knew I wanted Hector,” Kennedy says. “Ironweed” got glowing reviews, earning Streep and Nicholson Oscar nominations.
Impressed, Oscar-winning Hollywood producer Saul Zaentz (“The English Patient,” “Amadeus,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) urged Babenco to take on “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.” Babenco was flattered, but he was also gravely ill. “What was I going to do?” he asks. “Sit around in my pajamas all day?” It was a grueling six months. The sprawling movie was handsome but drew paltry crowds and vanished from theaters in no time. “I don’t know what happened,” says Zaentz. “The picture just failed.”
–Yet the seeds of Babenco’s resurrection were planted then. At the time, his world was falling apart. The cancer he had discovered in the mid-1980s was no longer responding to chemotherapy. But his physician, Drauzio Varella, a Brazilian oncologist Babenco had met years earlier while seeking treatment at New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital, immediately suggested a harrowing bone-marrow transplant–perhaps Babenco’s only chance. “He was at death’s door,” Varella says.
The gamble paid off. Suddenly Babenco’s cancer was under control. But it was filmmaking that truly brought him back to life. At the time, Varella was doing research on prisoners with AIDS at Carandiru, So Paulo’s maximum-security prison. Babenco was so weak he “couldn’t even open a bottle of Evian,” he says. But he looked forward to every Monday night, when Varella would call and relay stories of murder and mayhem from inside the prison, which Babenco considered “news from the living world.”
At the director’s urging, the doctor turned his notes into a book, “Estaco Carandiru,” which became a best seller. Making a film out of the novel, which had dozens of characters but no protagonist, seemed unfathomable. “I told him forget it–there was no movie there,” Varella says.
