Victor Luvi | e aí, partiu? (So He Left?) / 2022

the thieving magpies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Victor Luvi (screenwriter and director) e aí, partiu? (So He Left?) / 2022 [15.40 minutes]

 

Brazilian Telemílênio’s 2022 production of e aí, partiu reads like a delicious screen test for an upcoming adult gay soap opera filled with various versions of incest, generational warfare, and gay sexual intrigue that one would seldom encounter on US screens.

     This short film written and directed by Victor Luv, bills itself only for what it currently is, a short; but it’s so stuffed with other matter that can see its aspirations. Hardly have we begun the film, for example, than the film’s stud hero, Daniel (Theo Negueíra), dressing himself for his day’s outing, looks at his image in a mirror and kisses it in delight. He is young and pretty, and he certainly knows it.

      Only a short while later in an upscale grocery he runs into his aunt (Anne de Conte) who delights in finding her nephew working as a delivery boy, working his way up the money ladder (the only stairway to success with which she’s acquainted) and is willing to put in a good word with her husband, Daniel’s uncle, for a possible job with him.

      Daniel has lied. In fact, he’s on his way to his uncle at that very moment with a different kind of delivery, of bodily love. Evidently the two have had sex previously, but now the uncle has taken over an apartment that his wife only occasionally uses instead of the usual motel. It’s safer that way.

     The boy’s uncle Roni (Abiu José), unlike so many fictional uncles, is a handsome man in great shape, just the kind of uncle a horny gay boy who hints that work as a male prostitute might want. Presumably with such a fox of a relative, he’s performing gratis or at least cut rate. And the way to go at it it’s clear they boy enjoy the familial canoodling (it’s noted that he’s an uncle only through marriage, and that his aunt is the blood relative).

      But just as we suspected—watching Daniel’s entry to the building (and kissing himself again  in the glass doorway of the upscale escape) from the viewpoint, obviously, of another—auntie, long suspecting his husband of naughty goings-on since their sexual life has long been empty, has hired a detective, who reports back that it is not a woman, but a young man who has entered and left the apartment.

     Auntie has no idea what to make of that until he shows her a photo of the boy, which immediately resolves everything: her husband has hired her nephew to help him in the heavy research of his work. How wonderful, she proclaims, as she admits and explains her betrayal to her hubby.

    Roni doesn’t waste any time, meeting up with Danny boy once more, this time arguing that they should run away together for a few weeks, having had such a good time together. Daniel pauses with second thoughts; but when Roni explains that, because money is no limit, he will provide well for their time together, his nephew quickly warms up to the idea. Roni tells his wife that he has to complete a deal in Milan that may take up two weeks or more, and promising her another new ring, hurries off with Daniel to paradise.

      Since both actors declare amidst the credits that we can keep up with them on Instagram, I presume that the creators are attempting to drum up enough support to create that longer soap opera. I’d love to see the fireworks and more lovemaking between the handsome uncle and the self-indulgent nephew, one so mendacious and other so self-centered that they truly deserve one another as they play out their affair behind their money-grubbing wife and aunt’s back.

      Once more, however, I plead for better English translation. This film was titled in the written credits, for example, as “So, Left” instead the actual meaning of the title, “Then He Left.” I have little idea of what the self-given title might mean except, presumably, “So He Left?.”

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).