Night Stage: film review, in competition at the Berlinale 2025
A queer thriller rooted in erotic melodrama.
Brazilian directors Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon return to Berlin – after Seashore (2015) – with their third feature film, Night Stage, in competition at the Berlinale 2025.
The film tells the story of the theater actor Matias and Rafael, a politician about to become mayor of Porto Alegre. The two meet and fall in love. Their passion, however, is centered on the fetishistic obsession of having sex outdoors, possibly in situations where there is a high risk of being seen.
This creates several problems because Matias has to star in a TV series, whose producers would like to make the straight protagonist coincide as much as possible with the actor who will play him, in a sort of star-creation mechanism. Rafael, on the other hand, being a politician, and moreover in a party described very vaguely as conservative, naturally cannot allow himself to make his own tendencies known.
Night Stage: a queer thriller, between desire and voyeurism:
In the words of the authors, the work is a queer thriller, which calls into question desire, power and voyeurism. Indeed some dynamics linked to the use of suspense are taken directly from Hitchcock's cinema, while the obsession with filming and viewing devices harks back to De Palma's Red Light District (1984) and Live Action (1998).
There is also a split screen, taken directly from Carrie (De Palma, 1976) but completely emptied of the sense of suspense and used instead to underline the emotional fracture between two characters, at the moment in which the end of their friendship is evident. It is no coincidence that the film works better in moments like this.
The thriller part, although well shot, is very superficial, a ploy to add bite and bring the premises of Matzembacher and Reolon's work to collapse. Premises that are instead rooted in the melodrama genre. The love between the two protagonists is described through games of glances and moments in which video cameras and cell phones become an integral part of the staging. Devices capable of destroying the filmic fiction to restore the impact that the gaze of the other has on desire.
In cinema, watching is desiring, therefore the staging of the act of watching the manifestation of sexual desire becomes in turn a voyeuristic act that participates in the sexual act itself. In this way, the directors transform the spectator into a third protagonist of the embrace between the two, also involving him in the power dynamics that are created.
There is not really a dominant figure in the relationship between Rafael and Matias, but the roles of desiring subject and object of desire constantly change. In the end, it is the hypothetical omniscient eye of video footage, television, cinema, and the spectator, therefore, that represents power, that is an absolute and dominant “gaze”. There is no escape from this gaze.
It is the gaze that forces the protagonists to reveal themselves and show who they really are, for better or for worse. It is the gaze of society, the gaze of capitalism, that desires to witness embraces in which sex becomes a fight.
A gaze that separates love and passion, to be able to use the former as a tool of control (the love of the public towards which Matias tends) and to profit from the latter, transformed into a forbidden commodity, that can only be consumed in private, at the right price (like pornography or, in this case, Rafael’s sexuality).
In this perspective, typical of melodrama - the one deriving from Sirk or Visconti's Ossessione (1943) - for which erotic passion is always a subtle question of unfinished power that spirals in on itself, a series of aesthetic choices are explained, such as the symbolic return of the spiral figure, the flashes of red in the photography and the allegorical value of Matias' performance at the theater.
Night Stage: evaluation and conclusions
Ultimately Night Stage is an interesting film, not very successful in the thriller part and perhaps a little too self-satisfied in the exhibition of an aestheticizing sexuality. But very valid in the examination of the subtle erotic implications of power and in the ambiguity of a human condition, on the one hand, now definitively determined by its own constant self-representation and on the other victim of an increasingly pressing repression (emotional, sexual and spiritual), the result of an atomized and selfish society (as the neoliberal doctrine wants).