Review: Baby Is a Gritty, Graceful Portrait of Queer Survival
Brazil’s Baby follows a gay teen and his older hustler mentor navigating love, danger, and abandonment on the streets of São Paulo.
Brazilian newcomer João Pedro Mariano makes quite an auspicious screen debut as Wellington, the titular gay teen in the beautifully crafted street drama Baby.
Fresh out of a juvenile detention center, Wellington learns his parents have moved without leaving word of where they were going, abandoning him to the streets of Brazil’s biggest city, São Paulo.
Thus begins the 18-year-old’s Dickensian odyssey from boy to man, guided significantly by proud older hustler Ronaldo, portrayed with touching depth by Ricardo Teodoro.
Not long after the two meet, cruising inside an adult movie theater, Ronaldo asks Wellington if he ran away from home. “They ran away from me,” he responds, a simple and factual reply that also calls out families that would sooner throw their queer kids to the wolves than truly love unconditionally.
The film, directed and co-written by Marcelo Caetano (Body Electric), also points out Wellington’s iffy alternatives. He could hunker down in a state-run shelter while social workers try to track down his folks, but, to him, that’s akin to being locked up again.
Occasionally, he seeks the embrace of his chosen family in an underground ballroom house of queer kids of color like himself who’ve run away or been shut out by their birth families for being LGBTQ. But Wellington doesn’t always feel accepted among his house sisters and brothers, either.
He gravitates instead towards Ronaldo. The experienced escort takes the twink ingénue on as protégé and partner-in-crime, eliciting Teodoro’s nuanced portrayal of 42-year-old Ronaldo coming to care for a kid he initially seeks to exploit.
Adopting the nickname “Baby,” the protégé learns street lessons the hard way, as he and his mentor go from turning tricks to slinging party drugs for dealer Torres (Luis Barazzo). The narrative hits several familiar stops on the dire hustler-in-the-city roadmap. Baby suffers many misfortunes.
Yet the movie retains a potent zest for life, both in the plot and the filmmaking. Aesthetically pleasing while still true to the seedy milieu, Baby, not unlike gay hustler classic My Own Private Idaho, achieves a certain lyricism through its fine cinematography, astute use of music, and fluid pacing.
Caetano doesn’t employ humor often enough, but one clever edit — underlining the contrast between house kids voguing with abandon in a public park, and a club full of mostly middle-aged gays stiffly living it up to Euro-disco — qualifies as this movie’s version of hilarious.
Baby, for the most part, is a serious fellow. You can tell by the way he walks with stone-faced determination into any confrontation. That grim march of his constitutes the most convincing aspect of Mariano’s performance. He’s definitely not convincing as a voguer, but he has commanding screen presence, and the rapport with Teodoro feels natural.
The two enact an emotionally fraught dance between Baby and Ronaldo, who bond first as master and student, corrupter and innocent, then partners and lovers, brothers-in-arms. The pair’s pas de deux culminates in a graceful flashback, set, appropriately enough, to Paulo Jobim’s beguiling Valse.
Their story, however, really climaxes before in a pivotal scene taking account of the harm Ronaldo inflicts on his young charge. In that moment, understated yet wonderfully played by Teodoro, the film’s themes land with resounding impact.
And though Baby and Ronaldo’s relationship is thoroughly problematic, the scene also acknowledges the greatest harm inflicted upon kids like Baby is usually dealt not by strangers they meet in the streets, but by the flesh and blood family who are supposed to look out for them but choose to cast them aside.
Baby (★★★☆☆) is available to rent or purchase on digital and VOD through Apple, Amazon, Google, YouTube, and additional platforms. Visit www.darkstarpics.com.
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