Working from a book by Fernando Gabeira, one of the young commandos, Barreto and screenwriter Leopoldo Serran paint the kidnapping as the eruption of global and national hostilities at street level. In brisk expository scenes, the movie touches on the converging hostilities the dictatorship's squelching of dissent, the resentment of American influence and paternalism in Latin America. On TV, Neil Armstrong plants the U.S. flag on the moon; as Elbrick presides over an official celebration, a student watching the landing at home notes that space isn't even safe from American intervention. The moon-shaped cake at Elbrick's party looks like a bomb with a lit fuse.

The movie succeeds most at capturing the jittery fervor of the untested revolutionaries, who are alternately terrified and thrilled to put their rhetoric into practice. Anxious to prove he's more than a middle-class dilettante--and to please his firebrand comrade Maria (Fernanda Torres)--the journalist code-named Paulo (Pedro Cardoso) throws himself into the plotting of the attack, staged daringly in broad daylight (a suspenseful, well-edited scene). Instead of the gringo reactionary they expect, however, Elbrick, played by Alan Arkin, turns out to be an urbane, principled diplomat with a common distaste for the abuse of democracy. As government storm troopers close in and the deadline nears, Paulo wonders if he can put a gun to Elbrick's head if the time comes. The time comes.

Best known for his 1978 sex farce Doņa Flor and Her Two Husbands, Barreto does a good job of ratcheting up the tension among the nervous comrades and their apprehensive prey without resorting to melodrama. He emphasizes the strain of sharing living space under life-or-death pressure and constant surveillance, which makes even buying groceries a risky task. He also keeps the many complex relationships and motivations admirably clear.

But Four Days in September is way too cautious for a movie about revolution. The script fails to dramatize the sense of oppression that would lead to such desperate acts: A flash of stock riot footage is our only indication of how daily life is disrupted by the hated regime. Apart from a glimpse of political torture, the movie is too timid to name names or to specify outrages, even though the military dictatorship that ousted President Jo-o Goulart in 1964 was said to be responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths. Barreto has said in interviews that he intended the film to present all sides of the conflict in 1969 Brazil, but the lack of an overt political stance mutes the emotional impact of the story's outcome.

To its credit, though, Barreto's drama avoids agitprop speechmaking and espionage-thriller clichs. And its moral stance, which refuses to condone terrorism in the name of either oppression or democracy, has quiet integrity. Four Days in September may be a minor addition to the world's political cinema--if it were stronger, you can bet it wouldn't be up for an Oscar--but its naive revolutionaries, guilt-ridden police, and conscientious victims still show how public policies register on a private scale.