Sócrates review: a Brazilian teenager battles loss and homophobia
Christian Malheiros gives an outstanding debut performance as a young gay man mourning his mother in this low-budget slice of social realism from director Alex Moratto.
▶︎ Sócrates is released in UK cinemas and on BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema and Peccadillo Player from 4 September.
Cinema has a long history of engaging with the travails of urban poor, with social realism the de-facto mode of exploring these narratives. Following on in this tradition is the low-budget indie Sócrates, a sincere and heartfelt study of a 15-year-old Brazilian teenager (played by Christian Malheiros in his film debut) dealing with the consequences of the sudden, unexplained death of his mother.
The film adopts many traits associated with social realism (shooting on location, using non-professional actors and hand-held cameras) to portray the difficult conditions of Brazil’s impoverished neighbourhoods. In addition to depicting the hardship of urban poverty, the film addresses the issues facing Brazil’s queer communities, through the central figure of Sócrates, who is navigating a same-sex relationship in the shadow of rampant homophobia.
Masculinity is a key theme. Although he is not directly mentioned within the film, in a Brazilian context the name Sócrates recalls the famed footballer, who captained Brazil in the 1982 World Cup and stands tall as a symbol of sporting success even in a country with a long history of footballing heroes. The image of Sócrates the footballer provides a stark contrast not only to the experiences of the central character but to the flawed male figures he encounters. Each of the men in Sócrates’s life appears to fail him: his homophobic father disowns him, his love interest rejects him, his cousin refuses to house him, and one older gay male seeks to exploit his situation for sexual favours.
Visually, the film pays close attention to faces, particularly the main character’s. The repeated use of shallow focus reflects the way in which Sócrates is trapped by his social conditions. Much of the film emphasises the beige, muted colours of the urban space, in contrast to the evocative images of the sea at the film’s climax.
The film’s strengths include an outstanding performance by Malheiros. As a character desperately trying to stay afloat despite extraordinarily bleak circumstances, he holds the film together. He channels the teenager’s vulnerability, trauma and sexual desire while reflecting his charm, and inflects his performance with passing fits of anger and sorrow.
A title card at the beginning of the film tells the audience that it was made in collaboration with a crew of poverty-stricken teenagers as part of a Unicef-supported project promoting social inclusion through filmmaking. The project sounds fascinating and on paper seems to offer the potential to add a fresh angle to the film’s social realism. In the event, though, Sócrates runs the risk of coming across as a recycling of a familiar set of realist filmmaking tropes. There is little unexpected about this story, as it struggles to escape the influence of cinema’s ongoing fascination with social realism.