Director – Felipe Sholl – 2024 – Brazil – 103m
****
A man mourning his late grandmother but estranged from the rest of his family embarks on a gay relationship with an escort – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
Gabriel (Caio Macedo) arrives in Rio de Janeiro with his late grandmother’s ashes in a box. He is not short of money, and rents a hotel room. He wanders around during the day talking to his grandmother, who he clearly misses a great deal. At night, he finds a club named Glória, fronted by an area with tables where style queen Monica (Diva Menner) hangs out with her small entourage of friends. She explains she is the owner. Further inside is the dance floor where he spots Adriano (Alejandro Claveaux) and attempts but fails to pick him up, instead spending the night with another man.
However, a spark has been lit, and the next night Gabriel is more successful. He and Adriano embark on a passionate relationship. Adriano is an escort, and shows Gabriel the park benches where escorts pick up clients; he takes servicing his male clients in his stride, occasionally persuading the hesitant Gabriel to join him in a paying threesome. One night Gabriel hangs out on a bench in the park while Adriano is on a job elsewhere, and finds himself threatened and robbed by two escorts who claim his presence is curtailing their trade.
His relationship with Adriano continues apace until one night, suddenly, Adriano is gone. Vanished in a moment into thin air. Suddenly, Gabriel realises how little he knows about his lover beyond discussions of the latter’s work and the immediate pleasures of the flesh. He finds Adriano’s address, in a hotel used by a number of escorts who pay the landlord a hefty percentage of the money they make from clients. On arrival, Gabriel finds Adriano gone in the last 24 hours. No-one knows where.
Negotiating with the landlord to rent Adriano’s large room, pay off his outstanding rent in instalments, and opt out of paying thirty percent on any tricks since he isn’t an escort, Gabriel returns to the Glória club where he quickly becomes involved in an ongoing foursome with Monica and two of her entourage. Despite Monica’s warning that vanishing is what Adriano does, Gabriel sets about trying to track him down, watching video diaries from phones Adriano has left in his abandoned apartment. And then he meets a restaurant owner who claims to have seen Adriano…
The subject of bereavement is nicely handled through the character of Gabriel, particularly in the case of his grandmother, much of it through stream of consciousness voice-over as Gabriel pours out his heart to her even though she’s no longer there. He clearly got on with her very well, and you wonder how sympathetic she would be to his current lifestyle choices. Perhaps very accepting of them – who knows?, because the film never goes there.
To a lesser extent, Gabriel’s feelings of loss around the vanished Adriano are also a form of bereavement.
A whole subplot concerns Gabriel’s family (who we never see, although we hear a couple of them giving him a piece of their minds on the phone) and it’s clear that, although his grandmother meant the world to him, she was the only family member with whom he felt any connection at all.
Quite a large portion of the running length is taken up with sex scenes, mostly gay, including the odd threesome, and the foursome involving Monica and others. There’s a very marked distinction between the physical activity that comes with relationships, where all involved gain from mutual, sensual pleasure, and the physical activity which is a paid commodity where the buyer sets the agenda, some of which can be quite tough on the sex worker.
A sequence where Gabriel, himself now working as an escort, gets into a car with a man whose manipulative idea of sexual pleasure appears to involve mentally abusing and physically beating the other person up, is pretty gruelling. It’s really hard to know where exactly what the perpetrator’s sexual preferences lie, whether he’s simply trying to punish gays for what he sees as aberrant behaviour or whether he’s gay himself and a nasty bit of work, or something altogether more contradictory and complicated.
On the other hand, the sex scenes between Gabriel and Adriano on their own are intense and passionate, while the comparatively few foursome sequences are joyous.
The film might be reasonably described as Gabriel’s search for connection and family given his alienation from his own family, his late grandmother notwithstanding. The whole thing is competently put together with strong performances – Monica and her trans friend Laila (Jade Sassará) are particularly striking – and offers a rich man’s view of aspects of Rio’s fleshpots. Overall, this is a solid offering rather than anything particularly exceptional.
Streets of Glória premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 8th to Sunday, November 24th 2024.
This review originally appeared on DMovies.org: you can find it here.
Trailer: