Here is an erotic thriller from Brazil that finally suspends realism and plausibility to keep its eroticism in play right up to the startling final moments; there is an unexpected strain of the bizarre and soap-operatic.
Matias (Gabriel Faryas) is a handsome young actor in a stage company specialising in dance and physical theatre. Jealous of his boyfriend and fellow cast member, Fabio (Henrique Barreira), who has landed a role in a big new TV show, Matias sneakily tries to get an audition as well.
At the same time, he is secretly hooking up with Rafael (Cirillo Luna), a closeted politician on the verge of being elected mayor. The two men discover in themselves a passion for having furtive sex in public, addicted to the thrill of almost being discovered. By a quirk of fate that the film doesn’t consider it particularly important to explain away, Rafael happens also to be acquainted with the director of Fabio’s TV show, an arbitrary connection that is to have violent and fatal consequences.
The public sex fetish could in some sense be a metaphor for the complex way in which gay men can both defy and submit to pressure to suppress that part of themselves and not to acknowledge fully who they are. Another, more earnest kind of film might have left it at that. But this one is more concerned to offer us public sex as not just socially meaningful but also … well … sexy. And the sex-fantasy aspect of the drama becomes almost its sole point in the crazily climactic and borderline-absurd final minutes. It is a film which interestingly sets out to strain its own credibility, but it is also extravagant and subversive.