by Hudson Moura
Written and directed by Felipe Scholl, Streets of Gloria (Ruas da Glória) follows Gabriel (Caio Macedo), a young man from Recife who moves to Rio de Janeiro and settles in the neighbourhood of Glória. He teaches literature in university entrance-exam preparatory courses, but the ordered routine of his professional life contrasts sharply with the world into which he increasingly immerses himself. At a queer nightclub, he becomes fascinated by Adriano (Alejandro Claveaux), an older Uruguayan sex worker whose life is entangled with drugs, sex, and a precarious nocturnal existence.
Grief, Solitude, and an Obsessive Desire
Gabriel arrives in Rio already carrying a profound absence. His grandmother has recently died, and he has brought her ashes with him. Yet he continues communicating with her as though she were still alive in Recife, recording messages about the city and describing the places he discovers. In one particularly revealing moment, he films Largo da Carioca, points out the Outeiro da Gloria church from which Gregorian chants can be heard, and remembers the churches they visited together in Minas. The message ends with the painful recognition of his loss: “I miss you so much, grandma. So much. I can’t believe you’re not here anymore.”
These messages establish one of the film’s central emotional tensions: Gabriel’s profound disconnection from the world around him and his fear of solitude. Rio offers him possibilities for reinvention while he struggles to understand who he is becoming.
His relationship with Adriano develops out of a similar emotional need, but it quickly becomes obsessive and disturbing. Adriano is intensely self-absorbed, narcissistic, and egocentric, a destructive presence who seems capable of contaminating everything around him, including himself. Nevertheless, what begins as sexual and emotional fascination turns into something Gabriel cannot easily control. Rather than withdrawing from Adriano’s world, Gabriel moves further into it, immersing himself in Rio’s nocturnal world of escorts, drugs, and queer desire.
Looking for Himself in Another World
This is what makes Streets of Gloria such an uneasy film. Gabriel’s immersion in this world could easily be interpreted as an anthropological journey into a social environment different from his own, but that description does not adequately capture his search. Gabriel is not trying to study these people. He is trying to understand himself. Coming from a much more privileged social position, he does not need to inhabit the world of sex workers, filthy nightclubs, and marginal spaces for economic reasons. Yet this is precisely where he appears to find a form of acceptance and, perhaps, a way of looking at himself from another perspective.
In this respect, Gabriel recalls a recurring figure in Brazilian literature, particularly in the universe of Jorge Amado: characters who come from organized or respectable social environments but spend much of their lives in cabarets, brothels, bars, and bohemian spaces because these supposedly marginal places provide something their conventional worlds cannot. Gabriel is, in his own way, a rebel. His movement through Rio is also an attempt to abandon the lens through which he has previously understood himself and to experience the world differently.
Rio Between Intimacy and Anonymity
Scholl therefore makes the city fundamental to Gabriel’s transformation. Glória and downtown Rio are not merely locations but emotional spaces through which he moves between social worlds, between intimacy and anonymity, and between the person he was and the person he is trying to discover. His relationship with the city becomes inseparable from his relationships with the two absent figures who structure the film emotionally: his grandmother and Adriano. One represents a past he cannot relinquish; the other, a present he cannot possess.
What makes Streets of Gloria particularly compelling is that Gabriel’s journey never comfortably separates liberation from self-destruction. His desire to experience another world can be understood as rebellion and self-discovery, but it also exposes him to an obsessive relationship with a man whose own existence is profoundly destructive. Adriano attracts Gabriel precisely because he seems to embody a life without the structures and expectations from which Gabriel wants to escape, yet that apparent freedom comes with drugs, narcissism, instability, and danger.
At its core, Streets of Gloria is therefore less a film about Gabriel discovering an unfamiliar social milieu than about a lonely young man using that world to discover himself. Grief, sexual desire, class difference, obsession, and the fear of being alone converge in his wandering through Rio. His search for Adriano, his messages to his dead grandmother, and his movement through the city seem to circle around the same fundamental questions: Who is he becoming, and where does he belong?
Felipe Scholl does not make that search comfortable. Streets of Gloria is an uneasy film precisely because Gabriel’s attempt at liberation continually brushes against danger, dependency, and loss. Yet beneath its world of sex, drugs, escorts, and nocturnal Rio lies something considerably more intimate: a young man trying to live after loss, searching through other bodies, other social worlds, and the city itself for another way of understanding his own existence.
The Sea as Memory and Freedom
And then there is the sea, one of the film’s most powerful images. Scholl draws upon a figure deeply embedded in Brazilian cinema: the encounter with the ocean as a space of comfort, revelation, mourning, freedom, and possible renewal. For Gabriel, water also connects different geographies and different parts of his identity—Recife, Rio, Montevideo, his grandmother, Adriano, and the person he is struggling to become. The sea gathers together what the city has dispersed.
It is here that the emotional currents running through Streets of Gloria acquire their greatest symbolic force. Grief and desire, death and vitality, belonging and displacement no longer appear as separate experiences but as different parts of Gabriel’s search for himself. The ocean becomes less a destination than a space in which memory, loss, desire, and the possibility of freedom can finally coexist.
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Rating: 3.3/5
Film Info: Streets of Gloria – Imdb