A young, released offender struggles to regain his bearings in São Paulo, forging a tumultuous partnership in love and business with an older sex worker, in Marcelo Caetano’s raw, vital drama.
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Streetwise and full of heart… Embodying resilience with a bracing sweetness, Mariano is superb as a teen who has no choice but to grow up fast.
Baby 2024
Wellington (João Pedro Mariano) gets out of a youth detention centre, only to find that his parents have moved away and he is now homeless and resourceless. His father, a policeman, had never fully accepted having a gay son. Wellington reconnects, instead, with his old crew of friends on the streets of São Paulo.
At a late-night porn cinema, where they have gone to pickpocket phones, Wellington meets the older Ronaldo (Riccardo Teodoro), who has been earning money through sex work and low-level drug dealing. The two are soon eking out a living together. The contours of their relationship are not clearly defined, but a bond as tender as it is complex grows between them. Tensions erupt and trust is fragile, with Wellington unsettled in his rootless uncertainty, searching for an elusive sense of security.
Brazilian director Marcelo Caetano captures São Paulo in all its grit and vibrancy as a place of both peril and possibility, where fortunes can turn in a split second, but a great thirst for life gleams through the night unabated. — Carmen Gray