‘Last Night I Conquered The City Of Thebes’ review: Intriguing Spanish debut explores platonic male intimacy

Dir: Gabriel Azorín. Spain/Portugal. 2024. 112mins

Ancient Roman baths in Galicia, Spain, are the unusual setting of Last Night I Conquered The City Of Thebes, the intriguing feature debut from Spanish filmmaker Gabriel Azorín. In the present day, two young men take a bath in thermal water in stone tubs that are 2000 years old and lay bare their hearts. And then something magical happens, as the steam gives way to a very similar scene set in Roman times, in which another two men have a deep conversation about their fears and feelings.

A strong calling card for Azorín

With both a documentary element – in terms of its setting – as well as scripted dialogue, Last Night I Conquered The City Of Thebes offers a strong calling card for Azorín, even though it is not quite a home run. Further festival interest is likely following its Venice premiere and subsequent berths in New York and Thessaloniki.

The opening follows a small group of male adolescents as they make their way through the woods to arrive at the thermal baths, which are part of a vast Roman military settlement that is submerged by an artificial lake for part of the year (though not when they arrive). Some of the young men are from nearby Portugal while some are locals, though the Galician language is close enough to Portuguese that they can converse without any issue. The highlight of the early going is an awe-inspiring drone shot that follows them as they arrive at the Roman ruins, highlightsing just how enormous the Bande archeological site really is. 

The youngsters’ banter, which takes up roughly the first 30 or so minutes, doesn’t seem very consequential as they talk about video games in which they play as warriors, and there isn’t much else in terms of character development or plot. But Azorín shifts gears when the young men get into the waters and the film narrows its focus, concentrating on a conversation between the open-faced Antonio (Santiago Mateus) and the darkly brooding Jota (Antonio Martim Gouveia).

Antonio does most of the talking here and Mateus really shines in what essentially becomes a minutes-long soliloquy about how he has always looked up to Jota as a kind of older brother but how he now feels that Jota, who has gone off to the big city to study medicine, is not living up to his own standards and is slowly turning into his parents. Azorín has said that he wanted to make a film in which men would talk about their innermost feelings and this very long monologue — writing credits are shared between Azorín and Celso Giménez — effectively crystallises this idea, the entire conversation happening in one breathless take.  

This set-up is essentially repeated but roughly two millennia earlier as the two 21st-century males are replaced by brothers-in-arms Aurelius (Oussama Asfaraah) and Pompey (Pavle Cemerikic), with the former wanting to desert the Roman army and the latter not entirely sure this is a good idea. But their conversation isn’t quite as emotionally satisfying as Antonio’s cri de coeur, while a sense of deja vu starts to set in despite the two thousand-year gap between the conversations. 

For documentary authenticity, the heart-to-heart of the bathing Romans plays out in Latin, inevitably bringing to mind Derek Jarman’s homoerotic masterpiece Sebastiane, also about the hard life of Latin-speaking Roman soldiers. However, Last Night I Conquered The City Of Thebes seems more interested in questions of male friendship, male role models and emotional transparency in discussions between men rather than in anything remotely queer.  

The two conversations run long and deep and are really the two setpieces, with the surrounding material feeling less important. Nonetheless, Azorín has made a fascinating feature, set in an unusual and very picturesque location that effectively tackles the rarely seen subject of platonic male intimacy.