heading off to nowhere
by Douglas Messerli
Daniel Nolasco (screenwriter and director) Apenas Coisas Boas (Only Good Things) / 2025
I just watched Brazilian director Daniel Nolasco’s
2025 film Only Good Things in New York’s Newfest film series. This film
has irked its few commentators to date because of its confusing mix of genres,
most particularly in its second half; but even the first part of this complex
film combines a kind of “on the road”-style motorcyclist—Marcelo (Liev Carlos)
heading on his way to a city in Catalão, Brazil in 1984 for unspecific
reasons—with a local cowboy Antônio (Lucas Drummond).
Just as
he reaches the regional border of Batalha dos Neves, Marcelo experiences a
strange accident in a surreal like incident when a television set suddenly
falls from the sky down upon him, knocking him from his bike and putting him
into a temporary coma.
Meanwhile, Antônio, who raises cattle, using their milk to make cheese,
does his early morning chores before taking his horse out to explore his farm’s
fences when he discovers the fallen motorcycler, takes him home, and mends his
seriously bloody wounds.
As he undresses the cyclist and washes his
face and shoulder of blood we can perceive it is almost love at first sight.
Director Nolasco presents their burgeoning love with utter honesty, the camera
moving across their naked torsos, and even permitting us as party to Antônio’s erect penis as the quickly healing Marcelo
gives him a blowjob under the shower.
The first
half of this film, with a couple of important exceptions, is basically a series
of snapshots of the two making love in the nearby fields and jungles, with one
glorious shot of the two retrieving Marcelo’s still-intact motorcycle upon
which he gives Antônio a ride, after which his new cowboy
friend leads him to a nearby river for a naked swim.
In short,
this film begins as almost a valentine to the Brokeback Mountain (2005)
world meeting up with the earlier Easy Rider ethos (1969).
The two
exceptions or, perhaps what we might describe as intrusions, involve the
appearance of Samuel (Guilherme Théo), the henchman of the nearby rancher
Tavares (Norval Berbari) who has offered to buy up Antônio’s small farm, mostly
to rid himself of his neighbor—who also happens to be the disgruntled rancher’s
son.
Like the
sheep rancher’s representative in Brokeback Mountain, Samuel
carefully watches the couple’s sexual goings-on with disgust, reporting back to
Tavares. And soon after Antônio discovers one of
his major dairy cows shot and killed by Samuel.
Rifle in
hand, Antônio tracks down the escaping henchman, discovering him back near the
river where he fires his own rifle before again going on the run when Antônio fires his. Antônio races after him, shooting him in the back
before returning to his dead cow whereupon he discovers Marcelo to be missing.
Realizing that it is his lover who Samuel has been shooting at, he rushes back
to the river to find Marcelo apparently dead within its waters and pulls him to
shore, cradling his body with tears of sorrow.
Soon
after, he delivers up Samuel’s body to his father, the two engaging in what is
revealed as the cause of their tensions, Tavares’ seemingly homophobic hate of
his son. Tavares declares that “Samuel was like a son to me.” When Antônio points out he was not a son in blood, the
rancher declares, “At least he didn’t have this thing of yours. …I tried to
take that thing out of you.” His son declares there is no such “thing,” only
people, arguing that he doesn’t even need to shoot him since he is an old man
and will soon die, leaving his inheritance to the final inheritor of his awful
vision. Someday you will heal this awful thing inside of you, insists Antônio, but it will be too late. “You will already be at the bottom of a
river or six feet under.” Both of them clearly hate each other.
Antônio
then returns to his farm, for a moment holding up Marcelo’s leather jacket
close to his chest before closing up the house and returning to the river where
he ties a rubber rope—far more durable than the hemp fibers of —around one of
Marcelo’s wrists before tying the other end to his own wrist. He takes
Marcelo’s body out into the middle of the river and lets himself be pulled down
by the weight of his lover into the waters and death by drowning.
Or so at
least we are led to believe. That event occurs just short of an hour into the
one-hour and forty-four-minute film.
The second
half quickly reveals an elderly, now bearded Antônio
(played now by Fernando Libonati) moodily looking out over a city from his
stylish high-rise apartment filled with art and books. This Antônio is a cold, lonely man, whose lover Marcelo has just disappeared.
He sits down with police, reporting the missing man, regularly checking his
cell-phone by calling Marcelo, with no response.
Strangely, however, he has already ordered his maid, Helga (Renata
Carvalho) to pack up all of Marcelo’s belongings, including a beautiful crocheted
shawl that once belonged to Antônio, but in a
moment of love, Marcelo had draped around himself while standing in a nearby
field in the early daylight. While packing, Helga discovers an empty cocktail
glass under the bed, stained with what appears to be blood.
Later,
she is startled as her employer brings a large photographic enlargement of the
youthful motorcyclist and cowboy from the bedroom where it once hung to the
kitchen where he now hangs it.
Cleaning
up in the living room, she discovers the glass stopper for the bourbon
container on the floor, it too spotted with red splotches.
Soon
after, Antônio takes out the whimpering dog who Marcelo evidently loved and
care for, for a walk, leaving it with a gay couple sitting on a park bench.
Things do
not seem right, and she can only suspect that, although Antônio
and Marcelo never argued in their many years together, that there has been some
foul play, particularly since, as the film’s title hints, Antônio seems unperturbed by Marcelo’s disappearance
and, just perhaps, even happy. She reports to the investigator that ever since
the arrival of Antônio’s assistant, Eduardo (Igor Leoni), that there has been
an apparent tension between Marcelo and his husband.
At night,
moreover, Antônio visits a strangely-lit wooded park of the city, not unlike
the Trianon Park in the middle of São Paulo. There he plays voyeur, in
particular, to the two boys to whom he has given the dog (Rafael Freire and
Matheus Nascimento) as they engage in sex, mostly in ass-licking.
Even to
Eduardo, Antônio admits that he has never been happier or more at peace than since
Marcelo’s absence. When his assistant asks if he hadn’t ever had outside sex,
the old man answers that theirs was the kind of relationship that did not
permit such behavior.
At that very moment, Eduardo strips,
offering up his body to his employer, eventually sharing his bed.
The last scene of the film represents both Antônio
and Eduardo engaging in the nightly sex acts of the two boys in the middle of
the park.
What to
make then of the quite improbable or, if nothing else, inexplicable second half
of this film? Critics (the very few who have written about the film) and
viewers have almost universally been confused and irritated by Nolasco’s work,
even if they loved his freshman feature, Dry Wind and his many previous
shorter movies.
The
kindest review by José Mayorgas in Queerguru, is clearly perplexed:
“Older Antonio (Fernando Libonati) comes out from
the river as a mature gray bearded good looking man. He moves to the city and
becomes cold and distant, living in a comfortable apartment with nice art
pieces and a big portrait of him and Marcelo from the past in the farm days. At
the apartment there are also scene stealer Helga (Renata Carvalho) the help,
and Eduardo (Igor Leoni) Antonio´s assistant. Marcelo doesn’t show up (but by
unanswered phone calls or a voice message) we learn he is no longer present.
Beautifully
shot, there is a crochet blanket that worths the mention and visual poetry in
several of the rural sequences; the move to the city brings a harsh scenery and
in contrast, hazardous nighttime situations into the woods; all these provide
context to a fragmented story the viewer has to guess and try to find out about
the male lovers and the good things the title refers to.”
Similarly coy or simply confused was Gary M. Kramer,
writing for the San Francisco Bay Times:
“What it all
means is deliberately left for viewers to determine—it is designed to
perplex—but the attractive cast and stunning visuals will keep viewers
spellbound.”
Lincoln
Madison, writing for Film Queen Review, sums up most of the audience
reactions:
“We start off in 1984 (according to IMDb) with a
young man, Marcelo, riding his motorcycle down deserted country roads
(literally passing only one other vehicle) in the central Brazilian state of
Goiás, near the national capital city of Brasilia. Suddenly, a television set
falls from the sky, right on Marcelo and his motorcyle. Is that a metaphor for
something? I suppose it could be, but the dots never connect. Local rancher
Antônio find Marcelo and nurses him back to health, and they begin a romance.
Antônio is involved in a spiteful dispute with his bitterly homophobic father,
who happens to live on the neighboring ranch and wants to drive Antônio out of
the area.
Bad things
happen (I won’t give too many spoilers), and then suddenly we’re at present
day, in 2024, in an unnamed city, in a luxurious high-rise apartment. How did
we get from subsistence in the remote countryside to luxury living in the city?
No idea. Apparently some bit of river magic poofed them there. But all is not
picture-perfect, with signs of some serious off-screen possible violence. Did
Antônio murder Marcelo, or did Marcelo just wander off? Should we even care?
The story
centers on Antônio, who is as unlikable as he is inscrutable. He engenders
neither sympathy nor even interest, except for the morbid curiosity of whether
the story will ever actually have a point. (Short answer: no)”
I see
this film quite differently, and apparently more clearly. I haven’t yet
mentioned that blood plays a major role throughout the film, not just in the
second section. When Antônio first discovers
Marcelo, the cyclist is bleeding quite profusely, and the first major action,
as I have referenced, is
Antônio’s careful washing away of the blood from
Marcelo’s forehead and shoulder. Later, in the shower, just before Antônio turns to strips and joins the hunky cyclist in
the shower, we see him licking up the blood off the bandage he has just removed
from Marcelo’s shoulder. And as a prelude to sex, Antônio again licks the blood
from Marcelo’s wound, which seems to be healing amazingly quickly, as one
commentator observes.
Later, when Antônio shows up at Tavares’
ranch, his shirt is utterly blood-stained, this time presumably from Samuel as
he moved his corpse onto the truck.
In the
later half the movie, besides Helga’s discovery of the bloody glass and
stopper, Antônio welcomes Eduardo to drink from any
of the glass containers except from the one labeled bourbon, which he describes
as being Marcelo’s. Later, after sex, Eduardo gets up and pours himself the
forbidden bourbon which looks far redder than the dark golden color of the
drink it is labeled.
Perhaps,
for the sake of argument, we ask if that vague “thing inside of Antônio” which
his father reiterates he has attempted to remove, is not his son’s queerness,
but his thirst for blood. Let us just suppose that instead of being the
friendly cowboy in love with his boyfriend who were first saw blithely making
his way down the down the highway, that Antônio “arranged” for Marcelo’s
accident with some kind of supernatural power or see the improbable event
simply as a sign of fate.
In Antônio’s
fascination with and licking of Marcelo’s blood he has helped to transform
Marcelo into one of his own kind: a vampire of sorts. Surely that might explain
the seeming transformation of Antônio in the second half of the film. Perhaps
he never was the happy cowboy, leaping for joy across the grasslands with his
new love in hand, but a besotted blood-drinking beast.
Throughout
the early part of the film Antônio wonders whether
Marcelo will soon be leaving, not because he wants him to, but because there is
nothing “here” for him. Later, he warns Marcelo, when the cyclist comments on
the silence of the cowboy’s world, that he prefers it, and when Marcelo
suggests he could live a long life with his lover in this world, Antônio insists
that they will not live long. Perhaps he is hinting that he is already dead.
If so, we
have misjudged or, at the very least, been misled regarding our genres,
perceiving this variation of the Dracula story as another “Brokeback
mountain”-like tale. But then, even in Ang Lee’s movie, the cowboys’ love for
one another was thwarted by their own allegiance to the heteronormative world
almost immediately.
That
reading would surely explain the sudden disappearance of Marcelo, from whom his
companion has now drained all the blood and will perhaps now infect Eduardo and
the others boys in the park, turning them into variations of vampires as well.
Or perhaps, given their night-time couplings, they already are vampires of a
sort.
Perhaps
he can take this pop-genre even further, moreover, if we look at this film
through yet another lens. Let us take remove our spectacles of mimesis or even
romantic fantasy, and look through a telescope of allegory or extreme metaphor.
The year of
the first half of this film is most specifically designated in the script as
being in 1984. Although health officials had been aware of the new disease
since the summer of 1981, by the end of 1984, AIDS had begun to ravage
thousands of young gay men. Scientists had identified the cause of AIDS—HIV—and
the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified all of its
major transmission routes. The first cinematic gay tellings and documentations
of the disease appeared in the following year.
In short,
perhaps we must link the underlying vampire tale with a metaphoric statement
about AIDS, imagining that these two men, so interlinked with blood, had become
infected with the disease, their being shot (removed from the local society)
and their river drowning representing the seeming diagnosis of death after they
discovered they were HIV positive.
Nolasco
has already dealt with this very metaphor previously in his short film from 2018,
Mr. Fox, a “staged documentary” about his partner Acácio (Geovaldo
Souza) from the day he discovered that he was HIV positive to his last birthday
party. As I wrote in my review of that film:
“Dreams and fables also play a significant role, as
Acácio describes going to the beach with friends, having to take a circular
staircase to reach the shore before suddenly realizing that his friends have
abandoned him, the staircase having disappeared and there is no way to return.
At another point two men with an ax seem to threaten him in a forest, but
actually when they come across his dead body, one sucks up the blood like a
vampire and shares it with the other in a long sensual kiss.
Both of
these dream-fables, obviously, emanate from the fear and realities of AIDS, the
feeling of abandonment, loneliness, and the recognition that even in death the
blood of body contaminates all who have intimately shared it; having
symbolically drunk of the dead man’s blood becomes a kind of death wish in
itself.”
Let us
imagine that, although the two spent a long while “under the water” as Marcelo describes
it in a voice-over late in the film (where, he also argues, they might have
lived more happily than in returning to new life) that they survived through
the new medicines that began to be available in the 1990s. Perhaps the missing
Marcelo has simply finally died of AIDS, or gone off to die alone, providing a
great sense of relief and freedom to Antônio, having cared for his companion
and suffered from the disease itself now finding relief as an older man in the
sexual activity he has so long desired but in which he did not dare to engage.
The disease has changed him, and he is now perhaps no longer worried about
infecting others who also engage in dangerous sex, including his assistant
Eduardo, a clearly fatuous being who perceives himself as eventually inheriting
Antônio’s wealth, money the former cowboy probably inherited from the sale of
his own and his father’s estates.
There is
no way to “read” this film as a truly realist tale, however, or even to paste
one genre over another to create a line-by-line reading. Ultimately, I think we
have to read this film as a kind of fantastical mystery, a love story that also
involves the end of that love and death, a story of desire, passion, and the
terrible consequences of both of those emotions given the remaining homophobia
of our societies.
The title
of this film poses a kind of riddle: are those desires, the queer passions that
sets this story in motion and transforms it to a far darker tale “only good
things,” as we like to perceive them to be; or are they something else, actions
that endanger our society and end up in death? No one can answer this but the
viewer him or herself.
All I can
answer is that this film represents great many “things,” good and bad, but it
is never for a moment boring or unworthy of our deep questioning gaze.
Los Angeles, October 10, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (October
2025).
