Coming to NYFF by way of the Giornate degli Artori in Venice, Gabriel Azorín’s debut feature is a bold swing for the fences, the sort of challenging and ambitious film that ought to be more common from first-timers. To say that Azorín’s reach exceeds his grasp is no condemnation, and in fact Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes shows the kind of promise that suggests Azorín has the makings of a major director. He has a lot of good ideas, and even if they don’t all pan out, it’s still worthwhile spending two hours in his company. The action, such as it is, is centered on an ancient Roman hot spring, and in the first two-thirds of the film, we are mostly invited to hang out with five young friends whose travels have brought them to this spot.
As we see in the final third, however, Thebes is less focused on the what than the when. After a quick fade to black, Azorím takes us back to ancient Rome, where tired, disillusioned soldiers are bathing and contemplating their next move. What unites these two sections of the film, apart from the location itself, is a sense of youthful masculinity at a crossroads. In a recent Internet meme, it was suggested that the men of today think about the Roman Empire several times a day. But if that’s true, those men are undoubtedly imagining a regime of bravery and honor, the kind that Hollywood has constructed for entertainment purposes. (“Are you not entertained?!”) What Azorím shows us is something a bit more transhistorical. Men have always loved each other, and have always had to contend with exhaustion and self-doubt.
After a lengthy prologue that shows the five friends hiking to the hot spring in the present day, the film eventually focuses on two of the men, best friends Antonio (Santiago Mateus) and Jota (António Martim Gouveia) settle into the baths side by side for a lengthy conversation, which Azorín depicts in a single 20-minute shot. The sun goes down in real time, and as if our eyes were adjusting to the light, visibility returns to the shot. We learn that Antonio is studying medicine in Porto, and for the most part he patiently listens as Jota explains his feelings toward his friend at length. Jota admits that he has always idealized Antonio, and that as he has watched him grow more cynical, it has shaken his own sense of self. Antonio, understandably, doesn’t quite know what to do with this disclosure.
In the final scene, Azorím shows us some wounded soldiers at the baths, including one man with an infected amputation wound. We then repair to the same side-by-side baths from the previous story, as Aurelius (Oussama Asfaraah) and Pompey (Pavle Čemerikić) contemplate deserting from the military. Although they do not state it outright, these men are in love and they are trying to imagine a future in which they can be together, without fear of one or both of them being killed in battle.
There is a conceptual throughline connecting the two stories, one that goes beyond a shared location. While they hike and after getting to the baths, Antonio, Jota, and their friends keep referring to an online role-playing game in which they fight with various armies during the Roman Empire. The title phrase is uttered fairly early on, and some astute viewers may recognize the reference to Gus Van Sant’s own male-bonding hiking film Gerry. In that film, Casey Affleck mentions in passing to Matt Damon, “I conquered Thebes.” Azorín, quite impressively, takes this throwaway line and all it implies and expands it to a feature-length consideration of role-playing as a fundamental component of masculinity, and in particular love between men.
If Thebes doesn’t ultimately exceed the sum of its parts, it’s because unlike Van Sant, Azorím is intent on telling rather than showing. There is pleasure to be had in simply hanging around with these guys. Much like Eduardo Williams’ Human Surge films, Thebes is at its best when it trusts us to tag along on an uncharted adventure. It is extremely difficult to take this kind of durational formalism and marry it to narrative concerns, and what Azorím offers as the film’s showpiece actually brings it grinding to a halt. Having said that, Last Night I Conquered the City of Thebes is a sincere and uncompromising work, and it will be interesting to see if going forward Azorím is willing to keep paring the language away and let his images do the talking.
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 5.
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