Ten reasons to celebrate Pride Month with "Latin Blood"

by Cláudio Alves

LATIN BLOOD: THE BALLAD OF NEY MATOGROSSO | © Netflix

Last Thursday, Americans celebrated Juneteenth, but south of the Equator, Latin America's largest nation was in a cinephile mood. It was Brazilian Cinema Day, marking 127 years since Affonso Segreto shot what is considered the earliest cinematic depiction of Brazil in film history. A century and change after cameras first glimpsed the Guanabara Bay, the country's having a moment on the world stage. In the space of a few months, we saw such titles as I'm Still Here, The Blue Trail, and The Secret Agent win big at the Oscars, Berlinale, and Cannes. However, within Brazilian borders, other success stories have flourished, largely overlooked by international onlookers. Consider Vitória with Fernanda Montenegro delivering a staggering star turn at 95, and today's subject, the word-of-mouth box office phenomenon that is Homem com H.

Known as Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso in English-language markets, the music biopic arrived on Netflix June 17th. And, since that streaming giant is doing nothing to promote it, let me enumerate ten reasons why you need to add Esmir Filho's latest to your Pride Month watchlist…

JESUÍTA BARBOSA

Let's start with a familiar face to The Film Experience readers. Previously seen in the likes of Karim Aïnouz's Futuro Beach, Stephen Daldry's Trash, and the Oscar-submitted Great Mystical Circus, Jesuíta Barbosa plays one of Brazil's greatest voices – Ney Matogrosso. Born into a military family years before dictatorship took the nation by storm, Ney proved to be one of a kind from an early age, openly gay by the time he was eighteen and a nomadic artist not long after. Multidisciplinary to a deranged degree, he's been known for his work in theater, music and cinema, as a performer, director and designer. He is also a provocateur who flaunted his queerness even during the heights of far-right oppression and celebrated Brazilian culture in the face of Euro-centric cultural norms. And he's still at it today!

So, one hell of a role for Barbosa, who plays the man from his late teens to mid-fifties, surrendering himself to the character and doing justice to the artistic legacy that comes attached. Indeed, Latin Blood depends on its lead player to make sense of a script that's most unconcerned with explaining Matogrosso to a foreign audience. There's little hand-holding involved, which is an admirable choice but a risky one just the same. The actor is thus required to take the cipher-like impression of a myth and make him into an intelligible screen presence of flesh and blood, a siren-like voice, and sinewy muscle. It's a tour de force, alright, starting with the remnants of adolescence and a body inflamed by youthful need.

One can trace how the thespian delineates a projection of confidence as armor to the manifestation of the real thing as second nature, maturing in front of our eyes through the ease with which he inhabits his own frame. Another interesting detail can be found in his emotional openness. With such a decade-spanning narrative, you'd expect a certain emotional hardening to signify the passage of time. But, under Esmir Filho's direction, Barbosa does the opposite. The guardedness of a young man melts, and his arch mannerism shifts from affectation to an organic state of being. With maturity, tenderness overwhelms the portrait. As the film unravels, the text might be a tad stingy, but Barbosa never is. What he accomplishes is nothing short of a miracle, a superstar turn of blinding brightness that elevates the entire project.

THE MUSIC

Of course, a significant part of Barbosa's stellar work takes place in stage performance scenes, where he replicates Ney Matogrosso's unique showmanship. His physicality is a triumph of expression, sensual on the verge of grotesquerie, an intoxicating cocktail of wild ideas concentrated on swishing hips, groin thrusts, contorted limbs, a face that seems possessed by the music.

And what wondrous music it is!

If you've never heard about Matogrosso, João Ricardo, or Cazuza, you're in for a treat and a grand discovery. Latin Blood's soundtrack is a treasure trove of great tunes, compiling a sample of its lead's approach over time, a stylistic broadening that grew to encompass a variety of specifically Brazilian influences. What's more interesting is how the picture feels structured around that musicality, often predicating sequences on the meaning contained within songs. Sometimes, it does this to generate tension. Sometimes, it applies the same logic to bring forth dramatic resolution.

THE FLOW

Another way Esmir Filho's music biopic honors Matogrosso's repertory is its flow. More than a Wikipedia page put on screen, Homem com H or Latin Blood comes together like the movie version of a concept album. Entire relationships happen in the space of a musical gesture, Germano de Oliveira's editing making a feast of contrasting sights and sounds. Like Ney's infatuation with an older man at the start of his journey, a story contained in the pocket universe of a few beats. There's sex and dressing up in the cold light of morning. Then, a break-up dawns in cold stillness and sunsets in a broken mess. All this happens in the blink of an eye, bookended by the singer's discovery of his own unique voice and range. It might not make for the most illuminating biography, but it communicates something more valuable than straight historical info. It also helps keep a two-hour-plus flick light on its feet.

Admittedly, this can turn a lot of viewers off and is a strategy with as many qualities as setbacks. For example, there's no announcement of when the dictatorship starts or when it falls in the scope of Matogrosso's life, so the political context of his audaciousness can be challenging to parse out for someone who doesn't already know about his country's history. But should a Brazilian film need to explain itself to outsiders? The refusal to spoon-feed the audience is more admirable than not, and this frenetic flow makes for a more propelling cinematic experience. What it lacks in dramatic cohesion, Latin Blood makes up for in fluid motion, flurries of captivating imagery ready to fascinate if not elucidate. Isn't that a breath of fresh air considering the state of English-language movies of its ilk?

A CORRECTIVE TO HOLLYWOOD BIOPICS

As Latin Blood premiered on Netflix, another music biopic made itself heard worldwide. The trailer for Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere promises another paint-by-numbers child of Bohemian Rhapsody's box office and Oscars success. It turns out the most prescient movie of the 21st century might actually be Walk Hard, for Hollywood has grown addicted to the formulas that the 2007 comedy so joyfully mocked. Before the century's done, every music star will be Dewey Cox, with many an up-and-coming talent trying to solidify their place in the industry through some good old-fashioned awards-bait mimicry. As much as The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso falls prey to some of the subgenre's vices, it contradicts just as many.

Its most daring move might be how much it avoids flattening the titular hero, his impact, his art. Contradictions remain so, and complex creations are thus celebrated rather than neutered. Moralism is kept at bay, too, which is especially welcome when you compare this portrait of a queer artist with the aforementioned Freddie Mercury movie. Hedonism isn't vilified, nor is overt sexuality seen as something to grow out of, not even when the AIDS crisis manifests. If anything, Esmir Filho's script repudiates the impulse and spits on its face, tying carnal desires directly to Matogrosso's art and going against mainstream depictions of that epidemic that lean on punitive notions, even if by accident.

Again, looking at you, BoRap.

THE QUEERNESS

Under a Keith Haring masterpiece, Barroso's Ney makes no apologies for his promiscuity and demands the queer body be seen as something more than a weapon or a vessel of death. It's beautiful and worthy of love, worthy of freedom in all senses, even when that liberation goes against good manners. Later, as he supports his AIDS-afflicted boyfriend, this sentiment persists and blossoms. In one gorgeous passage, images of death are brushed away for a piece of tenderness between lovers. Marco needs help showering, body giving out on him, so Ney helps him up. They kiss, they laugh at their own horniness as the moment devolves into one of many gorgeously shot sex scenes, all the more remarkable because it involves a seropositive individual.

Queerness is one of Latin Blood's principal tenets from the get-go, informing how the camera considers Matogrosso's world and the man himself. The act of existing in open queerness is seen as a way of resistance and revolution, as something valuable that's intrinsic to the artistry on display. There is never a separation between Matogrosso's breaking of gender norms and his music, with many sequences illuminating the connective tissue between them. If it wasn't already evident, the dynamic extends to sex itself and not just platitudes about identity. This isn't a coy picture in any sense of the word. Instead, it reaches for a frank depiction of these realities rather than more respectable stances. Screw respectability to the stinking place.

THE STYLE

Such an approach is the only way to honor Matogrosso, whose very being at times feels like a divine manifest against shame. This is nowhere more obvious than his presentation on stage, almost always covered in makeup and drag-worthy fantasies. Whether dressed in a miasma of Amazonian references or giving a femme spin on the Brazilian cowboy, stripping down to nothing but burlesque bling or strutting his stuff in glitter paint and sparkle pants, Barbosa's Ney is an unforgettable vision. In other words, for those of us who love costume design and outlandish style, Latin Blood is a feast for the senses. Indeed, Gabriella Marra's costume design is the definition of awards-worthy – not that Netflix will campaign this for anything – as is Martín Macías Trujillo's cosmetic wizardry.

Because it's easy to overpraise the more theatrical fashions, let me give some love to the casual side of things. Beyond the stage, Latin Blood's team imagines intimacies that still reflect the outlandishness of performance, all while visualizing grand changes in style and culture over the decades. From a conservative household to hippie bohemia, from 1960s chic to the skimpiest 1980s speedos you ever did see, it's all exquisite.

THE SENSUALITY

But of course, those sexy ensembles would have no impact if not for a lensing that's as overcharged with desire as the film's real-life characters. Latin Blood is an exceedingly physical film, obsessed with bodies from the moment Barbosa enters the scene as adult Ney, body tense, still far from the erotic liberation he'll later live. But the camera isn't only fixated on its leading man's flesh, his muscles' ability to transfigure sex into dance and dance into sex. At times, the screen becomes conduit for the queer man's gaze, as in a pansexual waltz that takes Ney from partner to partner across what seems like a single night. Or when a new musical venture intercuts with nascent romance, public choreography echoing private intimacies.

And then there are the many moments set seaside, where the eye is invited to travel over naked skin, somehow always finding new ways to pause on the abundance of bulges on display. Pardon the crassness, but this is a legitimate part of Esmir Filho's mise-en-scène. Indeed, the director should be commended for the variety of ways he finds into sex scenes, playing with tonal flexibilities as well as stylistic abstraction. One early trist gains a note of humor from the presence of a Maria Callas portrait looking on, while a later fling is all about fragmented positions as seen from above. In one glorious scene, when Barbosa's Ney and Jullio Reis' Cazuza cross paths, the entire thing seems to happen in another dimension of being, domesticity turned magic by anti-naturalistic light and a smoky In the Mood for Love reference.

ITS STUDY OF MASCULINITIES 

Wong Kar-Wai is far from the only filmmaker whose repertoire Latin Blood plunders for inspiration. When Ney enlists, fresh out of his parents' home, the scene turns into a blatant Beau Travail pastiche, invoking Claire Denis' masterpiece for both aesthetic splendor and conceptual girth. Because it's not just about ogling sculpted physiques in a military dance, but also a collision of ideas on masculinity. The figure of the combatant could be seen as the epitome of conservative views on manhood, but, at the same time, such male-centric imaginings inevitably fall into homoeroticism. That's how we find such authoritarian imagery appropriated by the community, actively fetishized until the signals of oppression become instruments of kink. Not that Matogrosso's persona ever followed such ideas. If anything, it attacked them outright. Although unable or unwilling to fully explore these tensions, Esmir Filho still considers them, letting the camera suggest what the text won't verbalize.

There's an irony there, as our first glimpse of Ney outside his forest dreams comes in the form of his abuse at the hands of the military patriarch who won't have a sissy for a son. It's a violent scene, cruelty reverberating through the remaining narrative, that sets forth a rigid idea of what a man can be. What a man should be. If anything, the rest of Latin Blood is all about dismantling that rule, queering gender by any means necessary, be they a libidinous performance or a confrontational stare that won't back away nor break down in tears. That the movie accomplishes this while still setting the stage for reconciliation between father and son is a testament to its dexterity. That said, a lot of the credit goes to Barbosa's work alongside Rômulo Braga as the singer's father.

BRAZILIAN EXCELLENCE

Speaking of Barbosa and Braga, and Matogrosso for that matter, Latin Blood is a glorious showcase for Brazilian excellence. This celebration encompasses the artists working on the film as well as those dramatized in it, their work celebrated for all to see and already inspired younger generations unfamiliar with them – check out this viral kid. But it goes beyond those, for DP Azul Serra constructs many shots according to the works of celebrated Brazilian photographers like Alair Gomes and José Medeiros. There's an entire sequence, when Ney first meets Cazuza at the Rio de Janeiro beaches, that's like watching one of Gomes' still collections suddenly gain the gift of movement and color. Waves, frozen in black-and-white in days gone by, now licking up sun-kissed bodies in a thousand shades of turquoise.

NEY MATOGROSSO HIMSELF

Lastly, Ney Matogrosso himself is the best reason to watch Latin Blood. His story and his work deserve to be more widely known outside Brazil and other Portuguese-speaking regions, but it goes beyond that. The film is dedicated to him for daring to live freely, a sentiment we should hold dear as we celebrate Pride at a time when political movements all over the world are targeting the LGBTQIA+ community. When asked why he doesn't participate in the same kinds of queer activism as the younger generations, Matogrosso, who performed his queer art at the height of military dictatorship, said he need not raise the pride flag because he is the flag. From most other people, such pronouncements would feel wrong. But they taste like undeniable truth out of Matogrosso's lips.

We even get to see the man at the end of Latin Blood, when the fictionalized Ney finds the real one in the forest that's been a place out of time and quotidian realities from the film's very first shot. He takes us to a 2024 arena performance, singing and dancing for thousands, still as shamelessly queer and irreverent as he's ever been. For a man in his 80s, that's no small feat, complete with some titty flashing and another exuberant costume. It's impossible to resist the siren's sung spell. So, come and watch him, come fall in love with him, and celebrate queer liberation with those that led the way.

What else could we want for a perfect Pride Month watch?

Homem com H, also known as Latin Blood: The Ballad of Ney Matogrosso, is streaming exclusively on Netflix.