The body is never neutral: it is always a battlefield between pleasure and the norm.

(Michel Foucault)

The film moves along a precarious ridge between melodrama and thriller, between eroticism and the grotesque, weaving a narrative that explores desires, impulses, and power within a context of intimacy turned into spectacle. The story of Matias and Rafael unfolds along an axis of opposing tensions: the need to exist through the gaze of the other and the search for authenticity, which clashes with risk and transgression. The setting—composed of theater, auditions, clandestine encounters, and obscure places—becomes a stage for liquid identity and the performativity of being.

Matias and Fabio’s dance becomes a metaphor for both an internal and external struggle, a choreography that unfolds between bodies that challenge each other, possess one another, and lose themselves in the desire to dominate. But who is the ultimate spectator of this performance? Is it society, watching and judging? The voyeur, peering from the shadows? Or the character himself, unable to escape his own reflection in a web of ambitions and downfalls?

Dogging, a sexual practice that fuses excitement with risk, emerges in the film not only as an extreme erotic choice but as an allegory of the contemporary individual, precariously balanced between anonymity and the desire for exposure. The attraction to danger, the tension between the hidden and the revealed, shapes a modern obsession: to be seen, recognized, and desired. Within this dialectic, Rafael—a rising politician—embodies the duplicity of power, built upon both public appearance and private desire, while Matias absorbs and internalizes the lesson: to take what one wants, without considering the consequences.

Eros takes on shades of Thanatos when the game crosses the threshold of control, when excitement blends with threat, when the pursuit of pleasure merges with self-destruction. The film does not merely depict a cultural phenomenon but interrogates it without explicit moralism: is it a celebration or a critique? A portrait of unrestrained desire as a form of freedom, or the symptom of a fractured, alienated existence—one incapable of truly connecting with the other except through the thrill of the moment? Is it an ode or a condemnation of the phenomenon, or simply an exploration of a social practice that appears to be rather widespread?

Is it pathological enjoyment, detached from responsibility and relationality, or a representation of a mode of alienation?

The work ultimately reveals itself to be naive, even elementary in its narrative construction, oscillating between a disarming poetics and a thematically and stylistically fragile execution. However, it is precisely this simplicity that contributes to a disturbing effect: the reality it portrays teeters between the banal and the abyssal, between the naivety of a dangerous game and the radical nature of an existential condition. The film stages the struggle between inauthenticity and representation, between the need to exist and the impossibility of escaping the gaze of the other. An ancient dilemma, amplified by the society of spectacle, where the line between living and performing grows ever thinner.

Acephalous enjoyment is without law, without symbol, without the Other.

(Jean-Claude Milner)

14-Feb-2025 by Beatrice