Writers: Gabriel Domingues and Marcelo Caetano
Director: Marcelo Caetano
The beginning of this film, charting the journey of 18-year-old Wellington into a life of sex work and drug running, is incredibly realised. As Wellington is released from his cell at a youth detention centre in São Paulo, the other inmates are practising band rehearsal. This surreal and colourful opening promises a different take on the familiar story of a hustler trying to make his way in the unforgiving city, but the rest of Marcelo Caetano’s film fails to match this striking start.
Escorted home by social services, Wellington discovers that his parents have left the city without giving any of their neighbours a forwarding address or a phone number. Wearing a red jacket given to him by a good-natured neighbour, he walks the city in search of his mother, who appears to have left the salon in which she was working as a hairdresser. With nowhere else to go, Wellington hooks up with his queer friends who vogue in local parks and buses for money.
When this group of friends, calling themselves the Close Certo Family, go to an adult cinema to steal phones from unsuspecting men looking for sex, Wellington meets Ronaldo, a 42-year-old escort and drug dealer. Wellington, estranged from his police officer father, obviously has daddy issues, while Ronaldo surmises that he can make money out of the young man, smouldering like a Carlos Alcaraz with similar bee-stung lips.
Wellington looks youthful and is inexperienced when it comes to hustling, and so Ronaldo nicknames him Baby, a moniker that sticks. Taking advantage of Wellington’s innocence, Ronaldo pimps him out and gets him to sell cocaine and GHB on the street. However, the older man complicates business with pleasure, and soon the two men are in a relationship of sorts.
Films about gay prostitution are not rare, and Baby, although well-shot and finely acted, doesn’t really stand out from the genre in the same way as, for instance, Robin Campillo’s underrated Eastern Boys, Camille Vidal-Naquet’s visceral Sauvage, or even this year’s Some Nights I Feel Like Walking from the Philippines. Still, Caetano’s narrative is pleasingly economical with little exposition – we never really learn why Wellington was detained for two years in the juvenile facility – and time moves forward episodically.
In the first half of the film, there are two shots with children playing in the distance: one with a kite; another child wheels a giant hula-hoop in a park. These fleeting images give a sense of the childhood that Wellington has missed, not just in prison, but also growing up with an angry drunk for a father and a bully for an elder brother. Wellington has the scars to prove the abuse, and, in a nice touch, Ronaldo will get his own scar too.
In keeping with the terse style, Wellington and Ronaldo signal their emotions through expressions rather than words, although João Pedro Mariano as Wellington is more convincing when he is troubled rather than when he is letting loose in a nightclub. Ricardo Teodoro, as Ronaldo, embodies enough charm and affection to grant his character a vulnerability that is miles away from how pimps are usually portrayed in movies. Together, they make a nice couple, despite the age difference.
It’s a shame, then, that Caetano’s film becomes so insistent on narrative, especially as the start’s dreamlike opening is never repeated. Leaning in more to the strangeness of the city would raise Baby a bar or two.
Baby is released in UK and Irish cinemas on 12 December.
