Brothers of the Night

The problem with Brothers of the Night is that it's a docufiction, so one doesn't know what's true and what's not. "Is this real, or am I being manipulated by the 'documentarian'?" is something you'll ask yourself throughout. This distracts, irritates, and undermines everything we're shown. This would have worked much better as a pure documentary or a pure fiction.

The title of this documentary promises way more than it delivers as we spend a few evenings with some Bulgarian Romany lads who have to come to Vienna seeking opportunities. Largely unable to speak German and unqualified for just about anything, they have resorted to servicing the unfulfilled gay population looking for a bit of dominant rough. Not that we see any of that here, of course. What we see is a group of half a dozen men talking with varying degrees of bravado and coherence about how much they can make and how easy it is to extort hundreds if not thousands of euros for a quickie. Seemingly their successes aren’t manifest in the way they live. Permanently stoned, drunk, squabbling and generally behaving in as repetitively uninteresting a fashion as you could imagine, they chatter about buying their wives, or cheating on their wives - with the men who pay or with whores whom they pay - taking an almost vaunted pride in the fact that they are usually safe as they vacillate between staying in Austria or getting the coach home. There are semblances of brotherhood throughout, but so much of it is filmed in the dark with poor audio so half the time it’s nigh on impossible to know who is saying what to whom, what their relationships might actually be and the only vaguely sentient contributions seem to come from the locals who embrace, with limited enthusiasm, this latest tranche of handsome users in anticipation that more will arrive at the cafe “Rüdiger” next week, or the next. The narrative does interest insofar as it shines a light on a community where marriage and parenthood are still largely transactional affairs and where fathers and husbands see their own personal freedoms are their only priority, but after about thirty of these ninety minutes we have got the point and I was really quite uninterested in any of them.