Baby (2024) ‘image+nation Film Festival’ Movie Review: Marcelo Caetano Tweaks Relationships and Families in a Tenacious and Searching Coming-Of-Age Tale

Marcelo Caetano’s São Paulo-set “Baby” maps an odyssey of a boy in quest of intimacy and connections which he couldn’t have in the ambit of family structures. The eighteen-year-old Wellington (João Pedro Mariano in an all-baring, breakout performance) has just got out of a juvenile detention center. The details of the crime aren’t disclosed to us. His past registers amorphously.

It hangs over him but the film, with immense humanity and respectfulness, doesn’t let his jail stint limit the trajectory of his future. He drifts into the circles of the forty-two-year-old Ronaldo (Ricardo Teodoro), whom he encounters at a porn cinema. The man proposes Wellington try out sex work. Ronaldo suggests he be an escort. Wellington is armed with all the youthful good looks. He is naïve and eager, not yet scorched by duplicitous men all swarming around him.

Yes, the world is pitiless, bleak, and full of sharks like a drug dealer Torres, who almost pushes him back to square one, but there are also generous, loving, kind, and non-judging strangers who wouldn’t hesitate to take a battered soul under their wing. Ronaldo doesn’t live with his family. His ex has a new partner and they live with his son. Nevertheless, dynamics among them haven’t turned sour at all. This family shelters Baby (the professional name Wellington adopts, the one his clients use) in times when he needs it most. It doesn’t even demand much effort yet the family quickly becomes a safe space for the boy, even protecting him at times from the vicissitudes of Ronaldo, who, besides being watchful and nurturing, could also at times be utterly unreliable and reckless.

Critically, Baby reposes trust in the elevating kindness of others. The boy has had a rough childhood, with a drunk, abusive father and his mother barely coping in the shadow of the rage. Neither of his parents reach out to him. He searches for them. Along the way, he builds rewarding, sustaining friendships. There’s also the coterie of his friends, a lively diverse queer bunch wandering the streets and mounting defiant, joyous, brief energetic performances and somehow scraping together a living. The film presents various possibilities of found families, offering reprieve and a way forward that’s not entirely sullied and hopeless.

Baby (2024) — A still from “Baby” (2024)

Certainly, this is a coming-of-age narrative where Wellington has to grapple with his becoming on his own terms. He encounters mentor figures, and invitations to stray but he must find within himself a yearning, a sense of purpose in a life forged with personal agency and will. The narrative has ample chances to veer off into bitter, grungy woes and hardships. Both the paths Wellington is directed towards and ultimately the one he chooses are rocky, precarious, and viciously uncertain. But the screenplay by Caetano and Gabriel Domingues consciously tinges Wellington/Baby’s journey with hope and positive, regenerative possibilities. It’s not just the vision of a big, bad world that scars him forever. Baby has to navigate it, not without a few bruises; what emerges are also moments of delight and fresh curiosity.

He is vested with chances to reassemble his life in a way he deems truer to himself. He confronts severity every now and then. There’s ample scope for trauma and hurt. However, compassion and second chances are not stashed too far behind as well. Mariano and Teodoro form a compelling duo. The film takes a delicious, playful, fuzzy approach to the relationship the characters have. It flits among various spheres of equations-mentoring, paternal, and lovers as well. Caetano doesn’t ascribe a rigid definition to this, rendering it richer, more provocative, and also more emotionally tugging than what formulaic beats would have allowed. Ronaldo tries to exert certain strong limits for Baby, reining him in from straying but also exercising an unmistakable ownership. Of course, Baby lashes out, attempting to break free. This is a journey where he gradually reinstates his freedom.

“Baby” doesn’t brutalize its protagonist so much so that all the innocence and openness, absorbing what the world still has to share, are entirely lost. Caetano twists familiar journeys with an unconventional tang, a reverberation of complexity and dilemma undergirding both Baby and Teodoro. The latter must also discover ways of shedding the not-so-nice and damaging things about him. “Baby” is a great, soft-edged portrait of rediscovery and re-emergence. As the final, deeply affecting scene suggests, a promise of a reunion lingers as well as reshaping life with vibrant new probability.