This documentary pulls together oral history to trace a very specific New York chapter of gay life in America. Back in 2014, someone found a box stuffed with hundreds of letters sitting in a storage unit in LA. These letters went all the way back to the 1950s and were written to a young guy named Reno Martin, who'd later become known in Hollywood as agent Ed Limato. When Martin left home to chase a radio career, his closest gay and queer friends kept writing to him just to stay in touch. Every letter's signed with a fake name and ends with a warning to burn it after reading, which tells you everything about an era when just being gay, or dressing in drag, could get you thrown in jail. The filmmakers actually tracked down the surviving writers, now in their eighties and nineties, and turned what could've been dry historical digging into something genuinely personal and intimate. The people behind this doc found the original letter writers themselves, several of whom are stil...
The story centers on Gabriel, a young literature teacher who's just relocated to Rio after losing his grandmother. He walks into a gay bar and meets Monica, the charismatic trans owner, along with her circle of escort friends who welcome him in right away. But his attention locks onto Adriano, this magnetic guy dancing across the floor. The two of them have this electric, undeniable chemistry, and what follows is an intense, messy, all consuming affair. Adriano works as an escort, and he shows Gabriel around the park benches where guys like him pick up clients, treating the whole thing with his male clients like it's just routine, even talking a reluctant Gabriel into joining him for a paid threesome at one point. Somehow Gabriel becomes completely consumed by him, even though it's obvious Adriano's only in it for the sex and the drugs. Then one day Adriano just vanishes without warning, and Gabriel throws himself into tracking him down. Monica tells him this is just what Adriano does, he disappears, and in the meantime Gabriel gets pulled into an ongoing foursome situation with Monica and a couple of her friends. But he can't shake Adriano from his mind and goes looking for him anyway. His search leads him to a drug dealer, and he ends up moving into the place Adriano used to live in, tracking down his old contacts, and eventually finding him. Adriano brushes him off at first, but the pull between them is too strong, and before long they're right back together. What Gabriel doesn't seem to realize is that through all this, he's basically turning into an escort himself, and his fixation on Adriano is steering him down a genuinely destructive road. When Adriano vanishes again, Gabriel finally understands things might have gone too far, but not wanting to give up on himself, he reaches out to Monica and her friends to help pull him back.
A huge chunk of the runtime is dedicated to sex scenes, mostly between men, including that threesome and the foursome with Monica's group. The scenes between just Gabriel and Adriano specifically are charged and intense, clearly fueled by both chemistry and drugs. There's also this whole thread about Gabriel's family wanting him to come home, though it seems like his grandmother was really the only person he was ever close to, which makes you wonder if all of this is Gabriel unconsciously searching for some kind of replacement family. That theory holds up a bit more when you see him asking a random hookup not to leave him alone afterward. Adriano stays more of a mystery throughout. We get small glimpses into his past, like old phone videos of him with a guy named Martin who seems to have been his boyfriend at some point, but the film never really lets us understand who Adriano actually is underneath it all, or why he's become this way. I'm honestly not totally sure, but maybe this whole thing is meant to be about grief, isolation, and emotional dependency. Gabriel's clearly trying to fill some huge emptiness inside him and ends up losing himself entirely in this increasingly unhealthy relationship. A little more backstory beyond those audio clips about his grandmother would've gone a long way. This isn't an easy watch by any means. It's really about how obsessive passion can spiral into destruction, how the desire to love and be loved can twist into something genuinely nightmarish. It plays out as an intense, uncomfortable drama. The performances are solid, and the director's take on Glória as a setting is interesting, even if he keeps recycling the same beach and square shots throughout. It's a compelling subject, but there was room for this to be a much stronger film.
Bottom line, an intense, uncomfortable watch about obsession and self destruction that had more potential than it delivered. (6/10)
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