Look out for this sub­tle and furi­ous study of queer loneliness

The feel­ing that vio­lence could erupt at any moment spikes the atmos­phere of this oth­er­wise state­ly char­ac­ter study about a lone­ly queer teenag­er try­ing to sur­vive in the Brazil­ian coastal city of Por­to Ale­gre. Naked wrestling begins as fore­play but devel­ops a rough edge. Social gath­er­ings car­ry under­cur­rents of danger.

Shico Menegat, in his screen debut, doesn’t so much star in as haunt this pic­ture. He is a watch­ful pres­ence who con­sid­ers casu­al remarks that come his way as if look­ing for the trap. His guard­ed per­for­mance and the ten­der­ness it implies is the most com­pelling aspect of Hard Paint, car­ry­ing two hours of nat­u­ral­is­tic dra­ma and a shoot­ing style that mim­ics Pedro’s reserve: the cam­era is either total­ly still or mov­ing slowly.

Such a loaded per­for­mance from Menegat straight out of the start­ing blocks endors­es the method of co-writer/di­rec­tors Fil­ipe Matzem­bach­er and Mar­cio Reolon of hold­ing sev­en months of rehearsals before shoot­ing. Dur­ing this time the three shared pri­mal feel­ings about being queer men in Brazil. ​“We were very angry when we wrote the script and when we shot the film,” Reolon revealed at this year’s Berli­nale, where Hard Paint won the Ted­dy Award, ​“We were fuelled by anger and despair about things going on in the coun­try and overseas.”

When we meet Pedro it is too late for him to be well-adjust­ed. We are in the after­math of an inci­dent (the bru­tal par­tic­u­lars of which we only dis­cov­er lat­er). He has been kicked out of col­lege and is appear­ing in court. ​“Your for­mer col­leagues described you as a shy, anti-social per­son, unable to make friends. Do you agree with that?” asks the judge. Pedro’s face is inscrutable as he responds, ​“It’s their opinion.”

Adapt­ed from Matzmebacher’s own 2012 short about a boy strug­gling with an aban­don­ment Hard Paint starts from a sim­i­lar place. After sup­port­ing him in court, Pedro’s old­er sis­ter Luzia (Gue­ga Peixo­to) packs her bags to depart for a bet­ter job oppor­tu­ni­ty in the north. Abrupt­ly and uncon­vinc­ing­ly (giv­en the rap­port between the two), she is nev­er heard from again. Pedro is left to fend for himself.

One out­let that staves off total alien­ation and finan­cial ruin is Pedro’s alter-ego: Neon­Boy. For pay­ing cus­tomers, he strips and smears him­self with neon body paint while mov­ing his lithe, glow­ing body to sexy bass electronica.

Out of this small vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty he finds Leo (Bruno Fer­nan­des). With a shock of blonde hair and easy smile he is every­thing that Pedro is not: relaxed, hap­py, embed­ded in a friend­ship cir­cle and with a future beck­on­ing him to leave Por­to Ale­gre. Cru­cial­ly Leo is not put off by our hero’s awk­ward man­ners. Scenes of the two togeth­er show how the addi­tion of just one inter­est­ed per­son can, at least briefly, turn a film from an oppres­sive Repul­sion-esque cham­ber piece into a hope­ful rela­tion­ship drama.

The nar­ra­tive unfolds via episod­ic sto­ry­telling with devel­op­ments giv­en a roomi­ness that won’t be to all tastes. Key moments have the same casu­al weight­ing as more throw­away ones. This does not scan as inep­ti­tude, rather as the film­mak­ers trust­ing the audi­ence to per­ceive the skele­ton lodged with­in the flesh. For the anger that Reolon spoke of is not explic­it, it is swal­lowed deep down into the soul of its furi­ous, lost and, final­ly, open lead character.

Hard Paint screened at the 2018 BFI Flare.