In principle, youth reform/detention facilities in impoverished areas ought to rehabilitate youths from troubled home lives by giving them the schooling and care they want to be able to grow to be wholesome grownup members of society. However, the true-world penalties of those establishments are that they usually can not rehabilitate the people positioned of their care and steadily depart them liable to a future lifetime of crime primarily based on an absence of assets, funding, and brutal punishment from grownup guards. In Héctor Babenco’s Brazilian crime drama Pixote (1980), this failure of the detention facilities resulting in minors dwelling a lifetime of poverty and being liable to crime is proven all through the runtime of the film.
At the start of the movie the titular character of Pixote, performed by non-actor Fernando Ramos De Silva, is introduced right into a detention middle together with a bunch of many different minors. The viewers doesn’t know why or how the kids and teenagers have been caught, nevertheless it’s obvious that they’re soiled, bruised, and bloody after encountering the police, making the state of affairs of injured kids within the custody of adults horrifying to note. In addition to the poor bodily situation of those youths is that the station and detention middle they’re ultimately despatched to are each noticeably over cramped and the constructing situation is poor with soiled interiors and indicators of decay, that are a robust visible parallel to the decaying and damaged reform system of São Paulo, Brazil inside the movie.
The first night time that Pixote experiences is actually terrifying as he sees a fellow youth detainee being brutally gang-raped by a bunch of the older detainee’s in the course of the night time, with the sufferer’s physique bloody physique being seen within the subsequent morning when found by the pinnacle guard of the detention middle. This singular second is simply the beginning of the brutality our underage essential characters face in a system that’s supposed to guard and enhance their lives, however as an alternative, they harshly finish the lives despatched there. The second additional underlines the hopelessness of having the ability to enhance the lives of youth detainees when the constructing and system they occupy is so harmful to their effectively-being that they don’t have any foundation of a secure setting to mannequin their lives round, resulting in prison tendencies as they’re stored in a lawless setting that masquerades as a reliable public security safeguard.
After this harrowing tone-setter of an introduction, the movie reveals two essential moments of respite with Pixote watching a courtyard soccer recreation whereas getting his head shaved by the detention staff, being taught learn how to learn and write in a crowded classroom, and being a part of an viewers listening to the detention middle’s youth rock band, bringing a way of calm in an setting that’s extra brutal than secure in nature. These segments the highly effective means of sports activities, schooling, and the humanities to have the ability to escape from the tough realities of life that each one the youths originate from as Pixote’s household is impoverished and solely his grandparent can go to him, whereas others have tumultuous relationships with their households and steadily don’t have any first rate residence life to return to. As a end result, a cycle of committing crimes and being positioned in brutal detention facilities/prisons isn’t ended as a poor home state of affairs results in poor life selections as an alternative of optimistic selections. As Pixote offers with life within the detention middle, he begins to inhale glue whereas on cleanup obligation in a putrid lavatory, going into a really deep excessive. This juxtaposition of a laughing Pixote excessive on glue fumes with the dirtiness of the toilet flooring and bathrooms reveals the deep want for escapism that people want when positioned into irritating conditions like poverty or crime to deliver a fleeting sense of happiness. Along with this excessive, Pixote’s spiral into drug use moreover underlines the ever-rising sense that drug use and crimes are symbolic acts of freedom that impoverished individuals want, however can not receive by means of more healthy means as they must deal with survival to make it to the following day, and not pleasure.
Later within the movie, Pixote and different youth detainees are moved to a special detainment space throughout the night time, throughout which one among Pixote’s first pleasant companions within the middle is killed by the grownup guards and the dying is framed on the homosexual youth Lilica’s boyfriend. After Lilica’s boyfriend is crushed to dying by the guards after he fights again in opposition to their framing try, the minors of the detention middle trigger a riot to revolt in opposition to the dying of their harmless counterpart. This second is a vital breaking level of the movie as all of the minors understand that their lives are simply as endangered in custody than they’re outdoors in the true world. Moreover, this act of anger is an expression of dissatisfaction in opposition to the blatant corruption that always impacts legislation enforcement world wide as overlaying up acts of homicide is simpler than punishing the officers accountable for the crime themselves.
After the riots, Pixote and others together with Lilica, Chico, and Dito escape the detention middle throughout the midnight, forsaking the rock band chief youth when he says it’s safer for him inside the middle than outdoors of it. This scene is disheartening because it reveals the vulnerability of handicapped people just like the musician who wears a leg brace as they more than likely can not get a secure job with their bodily situation, and would fairly take free shelter and meals regardless of the fixed menace of dying inside the middle from detainee and officer alike. This escape then results in a extra-freeform second half as Pixote joins with Chico, Lilica, and Dito, who’s Lilica’s lover, as they interact in pickpocketing and drug coping with an affiliate of Lilica’s, and then attempt to acquire cash promised to them by a stripper for the cocaine they’ve. Without a dependable grownup system to handle the youth characters within the home or authorized sense, these kids are proven to commit crimes primarily based on pure survival, and not primarily as a result of they benefit from the act of committing them. Moreover, this a part of the movie absolutely encapsulates the failures of youth/juvenile detention facilities in São Paulo as their environments and guards have been so harmful to the well being of the detainees that they primarily had destructive experiences to construct their lives round, and not any considerably optimistic ones.
Following the participation in numerous crimes, Pixote, Lilica, and Dito grow to be handlers for an older feminine intercourse employee, Sueli, whereas her earlier handler leaves the city for a couple of weeks. As Dito flirts continuously with the intercourse employee, Lilica leaves the group, and Pixote and Dito determine to rob all the purchasers with weapons drawn to steal their cash. Pixote’s full change from an harmless little one caught in a destructive setting to an energetic participant in crimes is a disheartening realization that Pixote and different struggling kids might not have an opportunity to show their lives round after experiencing such traumatic and violent experiences, additional inflicting the vicious cycle of crime inside Brazilian society.
Not solely does Pixote commit these acts of armed theft for survival, nevertheless it’s additionally an train and management that his character was lacking within the first half of the movie. This lastly results in a tragic second the place Dito and Pixote rob an American buyer throughout his encounter with Sueli and within the course of unintentionally kills Dito when the American fights again. After the dying of Dito, Pixote is ultimately rejected by Sueli and is compelled to go away by himself into the Brazilian city jungle. With this ending, the movie presents the truth that an unchecked legislation system results in an unsafe basic public as individuals have to interact in prison actions to outlive or in any other case perish from federal neglect. With Pixote wandering offscreen, the viewers realizes that life, as he is aware of, is over for him and that identical to for lots of the detained kids in Brazil, they will by no means get it again.
