Main cast: Lucas Drummond (Young Antônio), Fernando Libonati (Old Antônio), and Liev Carlos (Marcelo)
Director: Daniel Nolasco
Only Good Things, or Apenas Coisas Boas for those keeping score at home, is a gay romantic drama.
Fans of queer cinema will immediately know what this means: tragedy, delivered via painfully contrived and pretentious exposition with heavy-handed imagery involving rivers, old houses, tides, and other tired nonsense that film students have been using since the invention of metaphor.
This movie also falls face-first into yet another cliché pit: soft porn passed off as high art. You know the drill — lingering camera close-ups on the actors’ nude bodies, focusing lovingly on the dangling bits because apparently every second of prolonged genital exposure brings humanity closer to enlightenment. Sex scenes are filmed in slow motion because that’s how artistic thespians do it, darling. Real sex happens at 24fps, but meaningful sex? That’s 12fps, baby. Feel the art wash over you!
So yes, this movie is, in other words, another generic non-English language “arty sex drama” that fits perfectly in the TLA Releasing catalog.
The “story” — and I use that term generously — follows Antônio, a Brazilian farmer who encounters Marcelo when the latter, injured, crashes his bike onto Antonio’s land. It’s very dramatic. Very fate-driven. Very our souls were destined to collide, along with your bicycle and my fence.
Before you can blink, they’re having all kinds of languid, explicit sex in slow motion, perhaps to represent the metaphysical joining of souls, or the transcendence of earthly pleasure, or maybe just because the director really, really liked that slow-motion button.
After plenty of softcore scenes that would make Cinemax blush, the movie suddenly shifts gears.
Plot twist! We jump to a much, much older Antônio, still naked because clothing is for people without vision, who leans into a completely different narrative. After the idyllic perfect love story we just watched, we now learn that the relationship went sour over the decades. Marcelo just walked away one day and was never seen again, and Antonio was relieved that he is gone.
Wait, what? So the whole languid slow-motion sex montage was… a lie? A fantasy? A metaphor for erectile dysfunction? The movie doesn’t care to clarify!
This part of the film seems to hint at Marcelo’s disappearance being a mystery for the ages. Where did he go? Why did he leave? Is he alive? Dead? Living his best life in São Paulo? But then, the movie gets distracted because it’s more interested in showing Antonio having sex with his personal assistant and then running off to the woods to have group sex with men who mysteriously pop out of nowhere like horny forest spirits.
All of this is accompanied by voiceover narration from Marcelo waxing poetic about rivers and old houses as well as the passage of time or the inevitability of decay. Art! Do you see the layers? The subtext? The carefully framed shots of men humping against one another? It’s all a metaphor for… something! Probably!
Nonetheless, one has to admit that the men in this movie, young or old, are really easy on the eyes. Clearly, one of the primary casting conditions was “looks great naked” and honestly? They delivered. These are some aesthetically pleasing humans, and the camera knows it.
While most of the sex scenes are unintentionally comical due to the slow-motion pretensions and the kind of bad overacting you’d expect from adult films, there is one particularly memorable scene where a man treats another man’s rear end like a juicy burger to devour that is quite… let’s say, artistic.
It’s about three minutes long. Yes, I timed it. Yes, there is plenty of shame to be had for timing that scene. No, I will not elaborate further. Moving on.
All in all, this is another skin flick that prides itself on being artistic, not porn, because it has tragedy and angst to accompany the nudity and sex. It’s like saying “This isn’t a cheeseburger, it’s a deconstructed beef experience with narrative weight!”
Sure, Jan.
Fortunately, the film is also structured in a way that allows viewers to fast-forward through all the talking parts and skip directly to what everyone’s here for if they were being honest with themselves. The pretentious narration about rivers? Skip. The lingering shots of old houses? Skip. The existential monologues about lost love? SKIP SKIP SKIP.
You know what you came for. The movie knows what you came for. Let’s all stop pretending otherwise.
