Fresh from Venice and Cannes, Cell 211/Celda 211 is U.S.-premièring as Opening Night presentation at The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s long-running yearly Spanish Cinema Now assemblage of new and old features, shorts and homages. Director and co-screenwriter (from Pérez Gandal’s novel) Daniel Monzón serves up an old-fashioned prison drama of nasty and “good cop” guards, a helpless warden, inmate rivalries and treacheries, a victory that is a defeat, and media manipulation à la Don Siegel’s superior 1954 Riot in Cell Block 11.

There is the immediate plot oddity that the lawman among the outlaws, who invariably rises as the protégé of their leader, is not a planted spy, and indeed is unable to relay what he learns. Instead, thirty-year-old Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) is a refugee from slaughterhouse work, accidentally bloodied to unconsciousness when the uprising begins at Zamora correctional facility.

Understanding that he is caught on the wrong side of bars and walls, he uses the cautions given him preparatory to this his first day as a guard. Humiliated and questioned in front of the desperados, he invents a drug-related murder, is believed by head honcho Mala Madre (Luis Tosar), and becomes himself a semi-ringleader. Playing his game by ear, Juan never wrings such full confidence from the boss’ right hand Tachuela (Vicente Romero) or the leader of the Colombian jailbirds, Apache (Carlos Bardem).

This male drama attempts to relate the trapped novice to outside life through six months’ pregnant wife Elena Vázquez (Marta Etura), in truncated flashbacks that explain their love and his not wearing underpants and subsequent nickname of “Calzones,” or “shorts,” and in scenes concurrent with, and stemming from, the disturbances.

State negotiator Ernesto Almansa (Manuel Morón) can, like Juan, only “do my best” to gain acceptance of convicts’ written demands, so the situation deteriorates, terrorist car bombs go off in the capital, and SWAT teams stand ready. With access to various leaks, the irresponsible media blare the confrontations on television, causing unrest to spread to other prisons and provinces and sparking crowds of frantic relatives.

SPOILER ALERT

“Good cop” Armando Nieto (Fernando Soto) remains a voice of reason, while fellow guard José Utrilla (Antonio Resines) tortures to squeeze confessions and information. None of this is very original, at the same time that it is not necessarily unrealistic, not in the Zamora Penitentiary Center or Westchester Country Jail or elsewhere. Violence escalates, a hostage is killed, goodness deteriorates, and brief later official hearings cannot come to accord about the outcome.

What is new, and might have made the film better than it is, involves the presence of four Basques locked apart as terrorist assassins but by their own lights political, as opposed to common, prisoners. Nowhere does the story bring out that the return of their jailed members to prisons in Basque Country is a major demand of the illegal militant group ETA. In any case, just as the four are in fact to be transferred, they are taken hostage by the rioters as bargaining chips valued by the autonomous Basque regional government in Vitoria. Never developed enough for those unfamiliar with Spain’s delicate balance, this issue clouds more than clarifies the story, and even the connected incident of a severed ear is not as effective as in Tarantino’s b&w début.

Its advertised comment on the country’s politics thus muted or wasted, Cell 211 does not distinguish itself from the pack and is no more than just another jailhouse rock.

(Released by Telecinco; not rated by MPAA.)