Now here's a potent, thrilling documentary that reveals aspects of life that makes us wonder why some people make the poor choices they do. We wonder
how come an educated, handsome guy, adopted by a family of means jumps to a life of crimes and robbery when he could be using his talents to do something
produtive for society? Leonardo Pareja was all that. And I wasn't sad or disappointed with the fact he was just another case of wasted opportunity and wasted
talent; I was actually more fascinated by the path he chose and how he managed to conduct criminal acts, robberies, never killing anyone and when trapped and
caught by authorities he always succeed in mantain dialogue, be daring and speak with such eloquence and manners that you don't see a bad guy. You just see someone who made a series of unfortunate choices and had to live and die with them. The psychological analysis on this guy would take ages and a feature film
about his life would be one of the most challengeable and interesting pictures we'd ever had. Instead, we have this minor profile captured a few months before his
death (I'll return to this later on).
A brief summary: he led a charmed life in Goiás but during the teenage years he rebeled against society and starting with a series of robberies, sometimes
taking hostages (his most famous was the niece of a powerful senator, a negotitation that lasted several hours). And he was daring. The level of audacity
was so big that he actually kept calling the police and informing about what he did and his whereabouts, provided interviews to radio station bragging about
his escapes from police and so on. He got notoriously famous during a prison rebellion in Goiás where he and a group of prisoners took several important hostages
icluding prosecutors and the infamous prison warden (who goes by the name of Hitler Mussolini and that's not a joke!) demanading better conditions in the place.
Pareja was the spokesperson of the mad group, his face was all over the news whether threatning to kill hostages if necessary or even making a strange bold move
by climbing at a water box, standing there with his guitar singing an old protest song then well-known due to its use in a successful TV series.
The interviews featuring Pareja are all intriguing and amazing. The level of confidence, humor, intelligence and wit displayed by the guy is out of this
world, and we're not talking about a psychopath. We're simply seeing someone who had some education, knew what to talk and whom to talk and he could easily charm
everybody, specially to his uneducated and more violent comrade inmates - some of them who betrayed him when he dennounced an escape plan and killed him in December
1996. Many years later and I still remember the guy because of that, but I never knew much about him except for this film.
Regis Faria conducted an important film, greatly presented, very elucidative interviews and counting a non intrusive narration by Reginaldo Faria, best
known for his cinema portrayal of another infamous criminal in "Lúcio Flavio - Passageiro da Agonia". The documentary includes testimonies with the inmates (some
colleagues, some of them we later find out as the betrayals); the hostages, and even Pareja's real mother - the film doesn't stick foot much about what happened
between them neither give voice to his victims from the past. The use of reenactments with actors presenting some of the crimes was a little distractive and could be left out.
Call me crazy but in a time and age when all you see in the news are criminals, killers and rapists
who don't feel nothing for their victims and can barely articulate one simple word, Leonardo Pareja demonstrated to be a figure to have a certain sense of
admiration, mostly is pity because he could have done so much better with his life. And compared to what we've got in later years, he wasn't all that bad.
He was just misguided. 10/10
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