Before moving to New York, when he was 24 years old, Puig arrived to Rome and enrolled to the prestigious Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, because he wanted to become a director. However, his fate lay elsewhere. Unlike Puig who was born in the Argentinian pampa in the small town General Villegas, where he went to the movies every day with his mother and watched Hollywood melodramas, Babenco was born u Buenos Aires. His mother Janka Haberberg was an immigrant with Jewish roots and his father was an Argentinian gaucho with Ukrainian-Jewish roots. Just like Puig, Babenco ended up in Italy on the run from his conservative father who had no understanding for his son’s artistic tendencies. Babenco worked as an assistant to Mario Bava and passed away at the age of 47 in 1990, and Babenco at the age of 70 in 2016. They are connected by the film Kiss of the Spider Woman, which brought his first Oscar to William Hurt. While Puig’s literary work was a pure formal experiment, woven from dialogues, monologues, police interrogations and theatre (the play was later adapted as a musical on Broadway), Bebenco’s film adaptation experienced censorship cuts in post-production because of the film’s allusions to AIDS, which at the time of the films production was synonymous with gay plague.
Even though the crazy American writer David Foster Wallace often remarked that Puig’s opus provided him with the greatest inspiration, Borges hated the titles of his novels. Moreover, Puig had a humorous way of mixing the South-American literary totems with Hollywood divas. In his imaginary world, Vargas Llosa became Esther Williams, Garcia Marquez was Liz Taylor, and Carlos Fuentes appeared to him as Ava Gardner. For himself he intended the character of Julie Christie, which Babenco would have approved of as both of them had the hots for Warren Beatty. Thus it is not surprising that one of the greatest Argentinian writers Ricardo Piglia notes that 'Puig’s dominant theme boiled down to the influence of popular culture to sentiments, extreme emotions, ambiguities and enigmas'. In the Kiss of the Spider Woman prison becomes a claustrophobic space in which machoism embodied by the political prisoner Valentin Arregui (Alfred Molina) clashes with the effeminate Luis Molina (William Hurt), whose life is 'trivial like the movies'. Molina answer to him: 'Until you find the key to that door, I will run away in my own way, thank you'. Therefore, the theme of social outcasts who literally and figuratively ended up behind bars, becomes Babenco’s raison d'etre.
This became evident in Babenco’s first feature film O rei de noite (King of the Night), romantic drama about the Brazilian Don Juan torn between two women. The author had previously directed several documentaries in order to earn a living, upon his return to Sao Paolo from Europe, and the most famous among them is the one about the legendary driver for Formula 1 Emerson Fittipaldi from 1973 (O fabuloso Fittipaldi). Two years after the King of the Night he directed his first great as well as bold hit Lucio Flavio, o passageiro de agonia about the Brazilian robber who exposed the corruption of the Brazilian police force, death squads and their violence. The film was made during the time when Brazil was under the mighty boot of the military dictatorship and the syntagm 'hybrid dox' was completely unknown, even though Brazilian Cinema Novo belonged to some other times as a victim of censorship cuts.
Babenco utilized a similar creative process in his cult film Pixote whose motives of exploitation and institutional horrors evoke the ghosts of Bunuel’s Los Olvidados. It is a story about three kids connected to a gay drug dealer and an old alcoholic prostitute, whose blade cuts deep into our consciousness reminding us of a bloody clash between street gangs (the boy who played Pixote was killed a few years after the movie was made in a skirmish with the police).
After his film Kiss of the Spider Woman Babenco revisited an almost identical ambiance in the drama Carandiru that takes place in the most crowded and biggest prison in Brazil. The author described this film as “the most realistic film in my opus”, while their queer pulsations are now expressed by the scene depicting a gay wedding. Even so, in this film the focus is on police brutality that causes a bloody massacre that really took place on October 2, 1992. Carandiru marked Babenco’s return to Brazilian realism after he gained worldwide fame with Kiss of the Spider Woman. He further capitalized on it with his film At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in which he combined Sting’s ecological excursions and Ciro Guerra’s spirituality (Embrace of the Serpent), starring Aidan Quinn as the naïve missionary, Tom Berenger as the mercenary who sells gas to the amazon tribesmen (the irony is even bigger if we know that Berenger has Indian/Cheyenne roots) together with his partner Tom Waits. In the intimate and fairly autobiographical Foolish Heart (Coracao iluminado) the protagonist, similar to Babenco, returns to Buenos Aires after twenty years to visit his dying father. The first scene takes us back to the milieu of Argentinian bohemian intellectuals and their obsessive idea of photographing the human soul, as the author introduces the character of an old German artist (there is a reason for Fritz Lang’s photograph here), even though we soon find out that the protagonist himself became a famous Hollywood director. There are also references to the hero’s favorite Truffaut (code: Jules and Jim), as well as Vincente Minelli, who, appears in the film, strangely enough, as a short man with a beard.
Even though Babenco’s Carandiru is inspired by the real character of the doctor Drauzio Varella, whom the author credits as his savior, the author’s last film My Hindu Friend once again flirts with intimate motives. Willem Dafoe plays a director who is dying of cancer and befriends an eight year old Indian boy in the hospital. It soon becomes evident that the hero’s hospital room becomes the same prison in which, to paraphrase Manuel Puig, there is no film projector that could show the legendary Rita Hayworth, whom his Molina adored so much. (Dragan Rubeša)