“Lo tuyo es puro teatro”: On Night Stage
Anchored in questions that interrogate what’s real and what’s performed, this queer erotic thriller winks at Brian De Palma while positioning the cinematic apparatus as its greatest and most pleasurable concern.
The men who populate the universe of Night Stage (Ato Noturno, 2025) exist in a permanent state of performativity. There are actors who rehearse monologues and politicians who deliver speeches; rivals who fake camaraderie and machos who feign heterosexuality. No sphere of their lives is exempt from the need to perform. Not even the private one: the capitalist need for an audience has taken root so deeply that any disposition of their bodies seems to require spectators; from the choreographed figures they compose onstage to the ones they construct during sex and display in the thirstiest cruising spots of Porto Alegre.
It’s in that diffuse limit, the one that separates the end of representation from the beginning of identity, that the thematic concerns of Night Stage reside. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Feature in the Latin American Competition of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the new film by Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon explores the relationship between Matias (Gabriel Faryas) and Rafael (Cirillo Luna), two men who meet on Grindr, begin a sexual connection, and discover the thrill of sustaining it in public. This uncontrollable drive collides with their personal ambitions, which require submitting to the constant scrutiny of the public eye: Matias is an actor who dreams of his breakthrough, while Rafael is a politician in the midst of a mayoral campaign.
The most urgent question emerging from this premise is, of course, that of truth: is there an essence that precedes everything else, or should we trust the wisdom of La Agrado from All About My Mother, who claimed that we are most authentic when we resemble the person we dreamt of becoming? Two structural axes ultimately shape the narrative of the film. The first concerns who is truly betraying whom. Excluded even from the chance to audition for a telenovela that’s about to be shot in his city, Matias decides to sabotage his colleague and friend Fabio (Henrique Barreira) to secure the role through a maneuver that evokes both All About Eve and the alleged feud that ended the friendship between Gwyneth Paltrow and Winona Ryder. Is Matias a mean social climber, or is he simply carving a path within an industry that committed the original betrayal of denying him opportunities because of his ethnic and sexual positionality?
Once he lands the role, the telenovela’s production urges him to tone down his queer presence on social media so that the demographic of heterosexual girls who are about to consume him can fall for him and project their desires onto him. This is where Night Stage’s second major question appears: that of gay (or more precisely, kinky) assimilation. How much of ourselves are we willing to sacrifice when negotiating with a system that sees us as replaceable? Isn’t it all, in any case, pure performance?
Matzembacher and Reolon seem to subscribe to the idea that everything is theatre and, in doing so, reaffirm their desire to double down and play with narration. That’s when they turn directly to genre cinema (more specifically, to forms often regarded as minor, such as giallo and soap opera). What begins as a relationship drama in the key of Ira Sachs soon shifts into the most inevitable reference when it comes to discussing erotic thrillers: Brian De Palma. With its vibrant colors, overflowing sensuality, and use of devices like sudden zooms and split screens, Night Stage constantly winks at the director of Body Double. It also subverts him: while De Palma tapped into the Hitchcockian obsession with the voyeuristic, Matzembacher and Reolon favour its reverse, which is exhibitionism. Its method cannot dispense with the participation of an active observer. Night Stage’s most lucid aspect is that it invites the audience to inhabit that role within the triad; to give up the well-meaning ignominy of the scandalized gaze from the adjacent seat and join the game proposed by the filmmakers. Or, as the poster of Rocky Horror Picture Show commands, to surrender to absolute pleasure.
By Bartolomé Armentano
Edited by José Teodoro
Copyright FIPRESCI