2024 Entry #008 01-04-24 “Stanley” is an 18 minute 2017 Brazilian short drama film which was written and directed by Paulo Roberto.
The story follows a young man who kills birds for his family to eat, plays David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World” on his guitar, then goes to a club where he and another young man dance with a woman. After leaving the bar they share a motorcycle ride to a lake where birds feed. The young woman sleeps, one of the guys swims and later the other guys fucks him. They talk afterward and you learn they went to the same church when they were little though only one of them remembers this. The one who remembers asks the other about his brother Stanley, whom he was friends with when they were young and it is revealed that Stanley killed himself. And that’s that.
This was okay. I actually thought I would like this one more than I did as I tend to love Brazilian films – I love the sound of Portuguese, and I had read an excerpt of dialogue from it which served as a description of the short, which I liked a lot. Sometimes a short feels wholly satisfying on its own with no need for more. Sometimes a short is great but you want more and would welcome a feature length version. And then there are ones like this, which feel like a fragment of something larger, which are not horrible, but are also not completely satisfying on their own. It’s not bad; there are several elements that work very well, and yet none of it feels like it matters in the end.
This short was in the same collection as the previous two. I’ll likely watch the rest of them soon, but not tonight.