Soft boys by day, kings by night. The film follows a group of young Bulgarian Roma who come to Vienna looking for freedom and a quick buck. They sell their bodies as if that's all they had. What comforts them, so far from home, is the feeling of being together. But the nights are long and unpredictable.
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 arent manifest in the way they live. Permanently stoned, drunk, squabbling and generally behaving in as repetitively uninteresti...
