02/13/98
MOVIE REVIEW: Four Days in September
A revolutionary political thriller

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

**** (out of five)
Starring Alan Arkin, Pedro Cardoso, Fernanda Torres, Luiz Fernand Guimaraes, Claudia Abreu, Nelson Dantas, Matheus Nachtegaele, Marco Ricca. A Miramax Films release written by Leopoldo Serran from the book O que e isso, companhiero? by Fernando Gabeira, directed by Bruno Barreto. In English and Portuguese with English subtitles. Rated R, contains violence, profanity. Running time: 103 minutes.

The Brazilian film Four Days in September, which got an Oscar nomination as best foreign-language film this week, is a political thriller that dares to be different.

It's based on actual events -- the kidnapping of the American ambassador to Brazil in 1969 by a group of young, inexperienced, but daring revolutionaries determined to restore press freedom and end the tortures of a repressive military dictatorship.

Remarkably, it takes a straightforward and sympathetic view to all three parties involved -- the fervent revolutionaries who first commit a daring bank robbery to finance their operation, the thoughtful kidnapped ambassador who confesses that he doesn't believe dictatorships solve problems and even, most surprisingly, the police who torture political prisoners in dank basements.

Henrique (Marco Ricca), the cop heading up the investigation surrounding kidnapped Ambassador Charles Elbrick (Alan Arkin), has a crisis of conscience about his work in the film's subplot. He is embarrassed to confess to his wife what he really does for a living. He even has feelings for his prisoners, although he realizes that torture comes with the territory -- the "Pandora's box," he calls it -- the government has opened up.

However, Four Days in September focuses mostly on one of the young revolutionary kidnappers -- Fernando (Pedro Cardoso), who is based on real-life revolutionary Fernando Gabeira.

Gabeira's autobiographical account of the story was written in exile in Sweden and published in Brazil, where it became an immediate bestseller. It wasn't until after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1989, 20 years after the events in Four Days in September, that Gabeira could return to Brazil, where he ran for the presidency. Today, he is a journalist as well as a member of the Brazilian Congress, having been elected head of the Green Party in Rio de Janeiro.

But two decades earlier he was a young, committed leftist who was recruited into a group of like-minded strangers, all of whom had hopes of making ripples that would change the government.

The revolutionaries are described by a pair of older, more experienced men eventually brought in to guide the "middle-class kids out for an adventure." The film's weak link is that we never discover who many of them are, even though Fernando eventually falls in love with the group leader, Andrea (Fernanda Torres), who goes by the code name Maria.

Although director Bruno Barreto refuses to take sides and lets the audience see the story from three different perspectives, all equally powerful, he does create and sustain tension. That's not an easy feat in a story whose outcome is a matter of historical record. He does it with frantic cuts between scenes and panicky moments where we're not certain what the outcome will be.

There's the walking-on-eggs sequence in which the young woman known to the gang as Renee (Claudia Abreu) worms her way into the confidence of a man who is the American Embassy's security chief. There's a scene in which the amateur kidnappers hang out nervously on a street corner, arousing the suspicions of a busybody peering down at them from her window who calls the police.

There's the moment when the police, who have figured out the hideout where the ambassador is being held, come knocking at the door. And especially there's the scene in which Fernando, who is known to the rest of the gang as Paulo, is told that because the police are closing in, it is he who must put a bullet in Elbrick's head if the gang's demands aren't met by a certain hour.

For it is Fernando, an intellectual who has come up with some of the gang's best ideas, who has surreptitiously befriended the ambassador. Elbrick acts as his teacher on the vagaries of American life, erasing some of his misconceptions.

Meanwhile, in letters written to his wife, which we hear in voiceover, Elbrick comes across as a very understanding, human character not unsympathetic to his kidnappers, seeing them as resourceful and smart. An almost father-son relationship develops between him and Fernando in which they feel free to exchange ideas.

Arkin plays Elbrick as a man of kindness and great courage, something that's counterbalanced by Cardoso's take on Fernando -- eager, anxious, committed, but in many ways naive.

It's a meeting of the minds in a minefield, and it keeps you on edge.