21/05/2024 - CANNES 2024: In Marcelo Caetano’s newest feature, a young man looking for his parents and an older male escort connect in the gay urban scene of São Paulo

Forget Call Me by Your Name [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Luca Guadagnino
film profile] - here comes Baby [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Brazilian director Marcelo Caetano’s decidedly mature story of queer love, friendship and more between an 18-year-old man and his 42-year-old father-figure-cum-lover in today’s São Paulo. The screenplay by Caetano and Gabriel Domingues draws from the aesthetic of a sort of gay social realism to paint a rich landscape lying at the crossroads between the two men, with the film having just enjoyed its premiere in Cannes’ Critics’ Week.

After spending two years in a juvenile detention centre, Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) emerges as an adult, his alcoholic policeman father having left the city with his mother. As he searches for his mother, he’s taken in by the escort Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), who takes a liking to the younger man both personally and professionally. Acting in both a parental role and as a lover, he takes Wellington under his wing and teaches him how to be a sex worker. Taking on the name Baby, Wellington is drawn deeper into Ronaldo’s world, which includes the good — friendships with Ronaldo’s former partner Priscilla (Ana Flavia Cavalcanti) and her wife Jana (Bruna Linzmeyer) — and the dangerous — encounters with the drug dealer Torres (Luis Bertazzo), who also takes a psychosexual liking to Baby.

The leads, both in their first film roles, are the perfect foils to each other: Ronaldo, personality hardened and features chiselled like a Greek god, opposite the charming and clean-shaven Wellington. In a refreshing normalisation of contemporary urban life and all of its complexities, Caetano’s direction is never indulgent, and sometimes even understated, in a film with the omnipresence of sex and drugs: the interpersonal is far more important. But Baby is neither exclusively a chronicle of the young man’s stumbling blocks nor an admonishment of Ronaldo’s possessiveness toward the less experienced man. Viewers get a glimpse into queer joy in many forms, from Baby’s chosen family, a group of young gay men who dance for money on the streets, to Ronaldo and Priscilla’s blended family with their son.

Caetano’s feature thus becomes a vibrant portrait of the many dimensions — and generations — of gay men in São Paulo: of men like Baby, men like Ronaldo, and men like Baby’s short-lived lover Alexandre (Marcelo Varzea), a wealthy older gay man who only had the luxury of coming out much later in life. The director also calls attention to police harassment and violence in Brazil through two of Baby’s close-call interactions. With the two elements together, viewers leave with not just a story, but also a fuller picture of many possible lives and moments in São Paulo — to be queer, to feel alive, to run from the police, to celebrate your birthday with your friends.

The combination of drum-heavy sound design by Lucas Coelho and a bouncy, pop-infused original soundtrack by Bruno Prado and Caê Rolfsen also lets us know that it’s not all down-and-out. It’s each man, living life as best as they know it, experiencing the intersection of their paths as friends, lovers and coworkers for as long as they can manage.

Baby is a production by Brazilian outfits Cup Filmes and Plateau Produções, co-produced by Still Moving (France), Circe Films BV (Netherlands) and Kaap Holland Film (Netherlands). World sales are by Berlin-based m-appeal.