Reviews: Baby
Not Really Embracing
by Egberto Santana
Baby (João Pedro Mariano) is lying on a bed in the house of the dealer who works with his accomplice-lover Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), consulting his mobile, and saying he will sell their products at Mamba Negra, an underground techno electronic music party, which mostly attracts the LGBT public, and happens in the centre of São Paulo. In the next scene he meets a friend, and is persuaded to go to a ball. What follows is a party with older gay men dancing slowly. Instead of the strident sound, neon lights, crowded arena, diverse bodies and clothes of Mamba Negra to which the film suggested it might take us, we see a cosy saloon with smoky blue light, and a moment of approximation between Baby and his future sugar daddy.
Throughout Baby, by Marcelo Caetano (Brazil, France, Netherlands, 2024, Première Brasil), Baby/Wellington divides himself between a crook’s life as dealer and sexual escort with Ronaldo, urban life with his group Close Certo, a short period with a sugar daddy, and the search for his birth family. While we witness aggressive, dirty and degrading images, to some degree in the criminal or sexual scenes, the image shifts to a lighter and cleaner tone in his life with the group and in his search for the family, resulting in effete and calm scenes. This approach is reminiscent of the style of a soap opera, mixed with an erotic crime movie. When Baby finds his family, it is in a silent reconciliation, steeped in nostalgia, with a dramatisation of the soap opera style, sober colours, ambient soundtrack and camera slightly shaky on the characters’ faces, creating an affectionate effect. Abruptly, he returns to urban life, without further consequences.
There is a mostly distant treatment in relation to the scenes depicting Baby with the vogue dance community Close Certo. These sequences, although they express the marginality of the context through the intransigent banter and character details, do not achieve a radicality around their own marginality, in dance sequences that do not even register the whole bodies, in the line of buses or the chat in the square. There is a control of bodies that do not seek control – and which would explode with their feelings on the dance floor.
As Baby is an 18-year-old boy who approaches the marginal world, but never goes the whole way, whether from maturing in a hostile place or from fear, the film approaches these same topics (drug traffic, prostitution, marginal urban life) from a distance, soberly, concerned to clarify its type-cast characters (evil boss, elderly and romantic accomplice) without embracing its own world on the screen. When it tries to impose an unusual element in the drama, it inserts a slack moment of “Brazilianess” played on the guitar at an untraditional family’s home, while the young urban dance, endowed with much more motion, is filmed from a certain distance, without embracing the whole bodies.
Another Queer Coming of Age Movie
by Iakima Delamare
In her analysis of Fantasma Neon, a musical mixing elements of opera and funk to depict the reality of a delivery boy in São Paulo, Mariana Queen Nwabasili observes that this choice of style “excessively beautifies the precariousness and daily exploitation of contemporary ‘uberised’ workers in Brazil.”
This comment came to my mind as I watched the opening scene of Baby, by Marcelo Caetano (Brazil, France, Netherlands, 2024, Première Brasil) in which boys in blue uniforms with shaved heads play a military march, in the FEBEM Juvenile Detention Centre. This soundtrack introduces the audience to the film. The symmetrical arrangement of bodies and instruments, combined with a clean and polished photography, is more reminiscent of European prisons than the tough reality of Brazilian institutions. The combination is reminiscent of contemporary rap music videos, known for their visual glamorisation of dissident bodies and places.
Baby can be included in the genre of Brazilian films dealing with insurgent lives in the context of urban capitalist systems, which I call the films that “eat bread baked by the devil”. When compared to films like Pixote, Baby offers a subtler balance between the tough lives and moments of relief which mould the leading character’s subjectivity. The film can still find some respite amidst the reports of violence, scenes of prostitution and coercion and drug use. One of these moments is the final scene, which reprises Baby teaching Ronaldo to dance vogue on the roof of his house.
However, these brief flights cannot divert the film from its cliché narrative. Although Ronaldo’s character is granted considerable complexity, Baby himself, who lends his name and body to the film, ends up as a poorer construction, without much autonomy, carried hither and thither by life’s forces..