D+

“Amelie” was a delightful film, but it has much to answer for when its style and spirit give rise to such an awful imitator as “Love Me If You Dare,” an extravagantly florid romantic comedy in which the lead couple are so self-absorbed and obnoxious that a viewer can barely tolerate their presence, let alone find them charming or sympathetic. Writer-director Yann Samuell apparently wants us to be transported to enchantment by the fantastic fairy-tale he’s contrived here, but most will be moved only to leave the auditorium before the story careens to its wild-eyed end.

The best part of the picture is unquestionably the first twenty minutes, when we’re introduced to Julien and Sophie when they’re eight-year old classmates. Both have problems. The boy, played by the exuberant Thibault Verhaeghe, has to come to terms with the fact that his beloved mother (Emmanuelle Gronvold) is terminally ill and his father (Gerard Watkins) relatively cold and unapproachable. The girl (Josephine Lebas Joly), on the other had, is a Polish immigrant whose parents are largely invisible (only her older sister, played by Julia Faure, appears when a guardian is summoned), and who is constantly bullied by her cruel fellow-students. Julien is the exception: after a particularly bad episode, he shares with Sophie a colorful round box given him by his mother, and before long they’re the fastest of friends, linked by a “dare” game: whenever either of them passes the box to the other, he or she can force the recipient to perform some embarrassing or destructive act. This naturally gets them into constant trouble, to the consternation of Julien’s father in particular, but it makes them utterly inseparable, especially after Julien’s mother dies.

So long as the characters are kids, “Love Me If You Dare” is reasonably diverting, even if the swirling camera moves, buzz cuts and blaring colors give it a thoroughly artificial feel. But after a bit the children abruptly become still-inseparable twentysomethings, now played by Guillaume Canet (a Gallic lookalike for Rob Morrow or Patrick Dempsey) and Marion Cotillard. And they’re still exchanging that damned tin box back and forth and compelling each other to humiliate themselves. Presumably the dare game is supposed to represent the tense but unbreakable bond between them, but for the rest of the picture it comes to seem nothing but a scriptwriter’s dumb affectation, a means whereby these two, who are obviously meant to be together, can irritate the hell out of one another (and, unfortunately, the viewers in the process) and serve as a means of separating them from time to time (at one point Sophie dares Julien to stay away from her for a decade, which he dutifully does). There’s definitely a problem with a romance in which the lovers are intended to appear enchantingly free-spirited when one is inclined to sympathize not with them but with the secondary figures who are inconvenienced or antagonized by their stupid pranks. At one point, for example, Julien clambers atop a stranger’s car, and one wishes that the owner would simply lurch forward and send the jerk onto the pavement. But we’re supposed to be charmed by the couple’s unremittingly selfish, thoughtless attitude and actions. This viewer isn’t. And when the duo gets together again after a decade, their mistreatment of their mates and children, one presumes, is intended to be delightful, but instead it seems repugnant.

Given the nature of the writing, Cotillard and Canet do what they can, but their characters are so inherently unattractive as people that despite their outward good looks, you can’t help but dislike them. The ostentatious visuals may catch the eye for a while, but they soon become as exhausting as the narrative, as does the repeated use of “La vie en rose” on the soundtrack–a gambit that comes across as entirely too familiar.

If you don’t mind paying full price for a short subject, you might check out the first twenty or so minutes of this misbegotten pseudo-romance and then bail out when Julien and Sophie suddenly grow up. But if you dare to hold on to the pointless end, you’ll feel as they you’ve gorged on a piece of garishly colored candy that turns out to have a very sour center.

B-

Life inside a notorious Brazilian prison where a 1992 riot led to the deaths of over a hundred inmates is the subject of Hector Babenco’s epic-length film, only his second since 1990. (He suffered from a serious illness during that time.) Based on a bestselling book by Dr. Drauzio Varella, who served as a physician in the vast and overcrowded Sao Paolo complex (with particular responsibility in AIDS prevention), “Carandiru” is a huge, sprawling portrait of the complex criminal society that dominated the prison and a cry of rage against the injustice the jail represented. Though the picture is only sporadically powerful and shows a streak of sentimentality beneath its gritty exterior, its strengths outweigh the weaknesses.

The film is basically constructed as a collection of interlocked vignettes concentrating on individual prisoners, tied together after a fashion by the presence of the doctor (a smiling, almost angelic Luiz Carlos Vasconcelos). The threads vary from the near comic to the tragic. In the first category falls an unlikely romance between a transvestite who calls himself Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro) and the squat, decidedly unattractive Too Much (Gero Camillo); it even involves a wedding ceremony in the gay cellblock. At the other end of the spectrum is the connection between Zico (Wagner Moura), a long-time resident in jail for drug trafficking (and a user himself) and handsome newcomer Deusdete (Caio Blat), his younger childhood friend recently convicted of murder; their almost brotherly relationship takes a devastating turn. Among the other inmates on whom the film periodically settles are Ebony (Ivan de Almeida), the functional mayor of the criminal community; Highness (Ailton Graca), caught on visitors’ day between the same two women whose struggle over him preceded his incarceration; Chico (Milton Goncalves), an elderly prisoner who longs for some time with his family; Dagger (Milhem Cortaz), a brutal killer who experiences an unlikely conversion; unsuccessful robbers Antonio Carlos (Floriano Peixoto) and Claudiomiro (Ricardo Blat), who depend on each other as much in prison as before; and the pathetic, hapless Ezequiel (Lazaro Ramos), whose drug habit forces him to an appalling act of violence. Babenco makes the claustrophobic feel of Carandiru almost palpable, which most viewers would probably find intolerable if it were maintained without break over the film’s two-and-a-half hour running-time. Fortunately for them–if not the prisoners–the narrative periodically cuts to the outside world in well-done flashbacks to the inmates’ past lives, which, like the “contemporary” footage, sometimes have a comic and sometimes a poignant tone. At the close the narrative takes its necessary turn into historical tragedy as a sudden dispute between inmates, just after a prisoner soccer match, erupts into a full-scale riot that, largely for political reasons, results in a decision to use maximum force to restore order. These sequences are harrowing in the extreme.

“Carandiru” is quite effective in recreating the stifling atmosphere of the complex and the sense of hopelessness that prevailed there; there’s a grittiness to Walter Carvalho’s cinematography that suits the material well, and Clovis Bueno’s production design is grimily convincing. The picture also incisively draws a portrait of a system of internal control that was based more on a social structure the inmates devised themselves than on governance by the prison officials, and it offers a powerful, often shocking depiction of the culminating rebellion. The cast is admirable down the line, too, with Ramos, the younger Blat and Moura making especially powerful impressions. But though one might single out individual actors, this is essentially an ensemble piece that would fall apart like a poorly-assembled puzzle if all didn’t make positive contributions. On the other hand, the film exhibits a streak of underlying sympathy for the prisoners, derived no doubt from the book on which it’s based, which sometimes comes perilously close to rank sentimentality. Recurrent shots of the doctor’s beatific countenance, radiating optimism even in the face of the horror he sees, accentuate the feeling.

The film ends with footage of the Carandiru complex being dynamited to oblivion after its closure. It’s a satisfying conclusion to Babenco’s intense picture which, if somewhat overripe, builds real cumulative power.