The Brazilian filmmaking duo of Marcio Reolon and Filipe Matzembacher is best known for Hard Paint (2018), which won the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film at Berlinale that same year. Now, they return to the festival by world-premiering Night Stage (Ato Noturno), which vied for Panorama Audience Award in the 75th Berlinale’s Panorama strand and will next open the 2025 BFI Flare, the London LGBTQIA+ Film Festival (19–30 March). Reolon and Matzembacher co-wrote and co-directed the film, premised on of a burgeoning relationship between an actor and a politician entwined in ways that challenge both of them.
The quiet and shiningly beautiful Afro-Brazilian 23-year-old Matias (Gabriel Faryas) has moved to the big city to take up a job as part of a famous theatre and performance ensemble, sharing a flat with his charming but pretentious castmate Fabio (Henrique Barreira). Matias begins hooking up with the ginger-bearded Rafael (Cirillo Luna) after meeting on an app, whom he later discovers is in the running to be mayor, defying that classic hookup rule: “no second dates”.
After a casting director seeks out Fabio for a major television role, ignoring Matias because he doesn’t fit a certain “archetype” (read: Fabio is white and implied to be straight), Rafael encourages his new sexual partner to seek out what he wants. This lead Matias to take more dramatic steps toward his new television career and cementing his relationship with the politician. The protagonist and Fabio very quickly enter a rivalry of telenovela proportions, twisting between polite performance partners—they act together in a crucial scene that ends the play they are in—and bitter career enemies. All the world’s a stage…perhaps?
Night Stage boasts a much riskier premise than it ultimately follows through with, coursing through two hours by teetering on interesting concepts that mostly evolve into more head-smacking plot points. The most distinct feature of the film is its orchestral scoring (with music by Thiago Pethit, Arthur Decloedt, and Charles Tixier), moving between plucked harp and symphonic-like strings that immediately betray the film’s melodramatic approach. While initially off-putting, it eventually serves the story’s narrative turns, setting the scene for tension and spectacle—even if the music does feel a bit soapy at times.
Reolon and Matzembacher, along with cinematography by Luciana Baseggio, use shadowy night scenes to try and veer the story into erotic thriller territory, but few moments end up particularly gripping in that way. However, the film makes liberal usage of what is often casually called bisexual lighting: purple, blue, and pink lighting in conjunction, which otherwise jazzes up the darker-shaded sequences. A stunning early film moment between the two lovers sees artificial light suddenly come in through a large window like the sun beaming down through the clouds from the heavens: a sign to stop becomes one to just keep fucking. More beautifully symbolic moments like this one, however, fail to make further appearances.
Rafael is closeted for career reasons, and Matias wants to be out and proud. Entering the picture here is estate security officer Camilo (Ivo Müller), who also seems to double as a bodyguard and political fixer for Rafael, although what exactly is in his job description we never really know. Conversations between the three on this topic are mostly left to direct confrontations rather than more interesting subtextual explorations of Rafael in public or his presentation with constituents, for instance, forcing viewers to fill in the blanks. The two of them naturally desire each other, but what it is in particular that each one craves about the other is also unclear over the course of the film.
Matias is fond of cruising, or at least observing cruisers, which he does several times during Night Stage‘s runtime. Here we get the tiniest glimpses of what ends up being one of the film’s most intriguing environments—men freely having sex in public spaces, typically parks in this case—yet we are denied more than a superficial look, the playmates instead acting more as statues for the intrigued Matias. The actor is also encouraged to put away select images on his social media accounts to cater to a public persona, indicating that he must dial back on certain characteristics that would make him not as masculine as the series wants him to be. A deeper commentary about how men, and gay men, are expected to look and act in public is clearly at play, but unfortunately, we never really reach it; for instance, we never see Matias while shooting the series or interacting with others in his newfound career, which feels like a large narrative gap.
Aspects of blatant racial and socioeconomic discrimination are bizarrely brushed over, just as the performance of gender and sexuality feels implicit to the plot but simply ignored altogether. Despite the film’s summary that emphasises the duo’s fetish for public sex and risky potential exhibitionism, this aspect is dwarfed entirely by the messiness that unfolds; perhaps a version of the film that focused on this would fit the erotic thriller label more effectively. Night Stage is an odd film such that it has all the spicy, delicious component pieces for a sexy, nail-biting work, but outside of its pleasant visual approach, it disappoints in many other aspects.
