Perhaps Suburban Angels is the downside of Valéria Sarmiento's spirited debunking of the Latin male mystic in A Man When He Is a Man (see November 19); Carlos Reichenbach, one of Brazil's most celebrated experimental filmmakers, here presents a relentlessly realistic drama of sexual politics in the sprawling suburbs of São Paolo. Here middle class and slum are just a traveling shot apart, love and rape indistinguishable. The film focuses on three female schoolteachers who are as likely as not to be held up on the streets by one of their own students; but Up the Down Staircase this is not. For them, teaching delinquent kids is a haven from their lives at home. Carmo, ostensibly secure in a middle-class marriage, champs at the bit in the clutches of her hypocritical husband, who by day seems to be a cross between a police detective and a public defender. Dahlia is bisexual and therefore twice lonely, living under the constant jealous watch of her retarded brother. And Rosa is trapped in a no-win affair with a married man whose treachery threatens to rob her of her career-her only escape from sexual dependency. This is not even melodrama, it's far too gritty and too gripping. Just when we think things have gone far enough for these women, they go farther, until realism becomes a bizarre hyper-realism. Reichenbach, as Richard Peña has pointed out, speaks of the strong influence on his work of Japanese director Shohei Imamura, whose films also reveal sexuality at the core of almost any relationship, as well as the relentless drive to maintain even one's unhappiness in the face of losing all. Reichenbach's "insect women" also burrow in-Carmo, into her naiveté; Dahlia, into her cynicism; Rosa, into suicide.