João Victor Borges | Vigia (Night Watch) / 2018

watchman, what of the night?

by Douglas Messerli

 

João Victor Borges (screenwriter and director) Vigia (Night Watch) / 2018 [22 minutes]

 

Magno (Alexandre Amador) has been working the night shift at a huge Rio de Janeiro supermarket for 13 years now, and is tired. The movie begins, in fact, with Magno in bed and follows him, still drowsy to the market where he serves as the watchman, the one who watches over all the nightwalkers who shop the huge aisles.

    His job is to keep an eye on their movements, particularly the young boys with backpacks who wander up and down the long lanes of groceries with no clear intention. We see Magno early on in the movie, stop a young man as he is checking out, demanding to see his own arm bag since he the customer has also been seen lifting up bottles of champagne.

    He claims to have put them back, deciding against their purchase, and he has paid for the items he has selected, so he is righteously angered for the demand. And when Magno forces him to open his bag, he sees nothing inside.

   As soon as Magno turns away, the new cashier, Bismarck (Maya de Paiva) quietly apologizes to the young man. But later he equally apologizes to his colleague for not treating his job seriously. He even suggests they ride the train back together since they live not far from one another.

    So begins a strange friendship between two highly unlikely beings, Magno, a loyal working black man who wears a suit and the pink-haired, effeminately gay Bismarck.

    If Magno can be said to be asleep in life, nearly dead, the already worn-out cashier, only 3-weeks on the job, is like a jolt of energy to Magno’s seeming dead life. Bismarck insists that he go swimming with him in the ocean, which is not far from Bismarck’s place. And although he at first refuses, Magno joins him, even smiling for the first time, enjoying a swim for the first time in many years.

    Bismarck invites him to his place where they drink beer and continue to smoke joints, expressing that the place would be perfect if it only had a nearby pool. The boy attempts to explain to the loyal guardian of the supermarket that the young boys who steal from the store are not doing it to bring down the company, but for a number of unrelated reasons. And others are out of work.

    Yet the loyalist argues that order must be retained. He has never stolen and he feels the petty thieves are attempting to corrupt the business, to destroy the supermarket’s service. Bismarck, on the other hand, is filled with dreams, and can hardly bear sitting all night dealing with stupid customers and the “beep, beep, beep” or ringing up the orders. He hopes one day to open a bar, clearly not a significant aspiration, but far better than the life Magno works wandering the aisles night after night. And we recognize in the elder’s description of never hearing anyone say hello or even acknowledging his existence just how isolated and lonely this man is.

     For the first time apparently in his life, Magno has met up with someone willing to challenge his strong code of order and obedience to the system. Both men complain of the customers who often treat them as if they did not exist, that they are there only serve them. In the midst of their discussion the Brazilian director João Victor Borges concentrates of Magno’s eyes as we are made to realize just how tired, how worn down this man has become. Without saying anything, we realize that his job is something close to a “night of the living dead.”

     The film returns to an image like the first of the film, with the repetitions of Magno’s life, rising from bed, catching the train to work. But when he arrives this evening, Bismarck is missing. The manager tells Magno that the boy has been fired. The camera operator Anderson has caught him stealing, and rechecking the tapes has discovered that “the kid stole something every day,” food, deodorant, even a pool. Anderson cannot comprehend why Magno has never discovered the lefts, never even patted him down.

   Anderson’s bank of camera views reveal the petty robberies, but suddenly for Magno they come alive as various variations of him and the kid with pink hair kissing, making love, swimming, enjoying life together. Bismarck has brought the almost dead Magno back to life, and the boy’s loss means that he can only return to the aisles of the dead. Can he escape? Borges and his film does not answer that.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).