Hector Babenco’s 1981 study of a ten-year-old delinquent who mugs, pimps, and hustles through the reformatories and slums of Brazil without revealing a glimmer of moral consciousness. The film is a return to the style and assumptions of neorealism, though it’s a neorealism stripped of sentimentality and romantic fatalism. Babenco does his best (through an objective, generalizing camera style based on lateral tracks and a looping, episodic narrative that suppresses authorial guidance) to hide his attitudes toward the material, yet they emerge in such matters as the treatment of motherhood (which is literally all but absent in the film, but is projected successively on a psychologist, a warden, a young homosexual, and an aging whore). Babenco scandalizes, but he doesn’t editorialize—which may be the real scandal. With Marilia Pera and Jorge Juliano. In Spanish with subtitles. 122 min.