Not So O Fantastic
Added 5/15/2007
The story of the girl who dumps the guy for not hunkering down is as old as the sun, but the way in which this girl, Odete (Ana Cristina de Oliveira), fills the void is strange and fresh. She is a supermarket rollergirl (does this job actually exist in Portugal?) who wants more from life, a better career, a wedding, and most importantly a baby. He's not interested so they split. From there Odete shows up at a funeral parlor with nothing but nefarious things on her mind and leaves deeply in love with the dearly departed Pedro. Soon after she begins to experience symptoms of pregnancy; morning sickness, enlarged belly, etc., and she is convinced that Pedro impregnated her from the grave. The pregnancy test says she isn't pregnant at all, but who has time for such small details? The other titular drifter, Rui, is not as much a focus of the film (The original Portuguese title is "Odete"). He truly was Pedro's lover as we see in the very first scene, before we know anything about these characters we know Rui and Pedro are in love. Those pronouncements of love, however, are followed by the deadly car wreck that sets the rest of the film in motion.
This film was a fairly ugly miss in my book. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense (although it doesn't feel like a puzzler) and the characters are horrible people and horribly sick. I'm sure director Joao Pedro Rodrigues was going for a meditation on loss but he actually came up with a nonsensical mind bender with some gay porn thrown in for whoever might be interested. She goes shopping and he goes cruising and I'm sure it is all very therapeutic for these characters but I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to get out of it. There is a lot of Christian symbolism hanging about, from crosses to immaculate conceptions to bloody palms but to what end? I obviously don't want everything spelled out for me, but whatever message was trying to be sent did not arrive here.
This is not to say that all is lost either. The opaque nature of the film is a positive in a lot of ways. If a character makes a face or a gesture it isn't dwelled upon or underlined, even if they aren't sitting in the center of the shot. Music doesn't just arrive to prod your emotions along either. Rodrigues has an eye for catching attention grabbing shots and the patience to hold them for longer than 3 seconds. There is also a strong performance by Oliveira as Odete. Her character is mostly a tragic one, but at times the pathetic nature of her is so overwhelming that the performance slides over into the comic territory. This is a woman, after all, who rejected her very real boyfriend and replaced him with an imaginary baby conceived by a man who she has never met and is now dead. That is her prerogative I suppose, but you will agree that it is a little strange. So while there are ideas here I just wish they would have been made a little louder and a little clearer. **
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Disappointing
Added 11/26/2006
After seeing O FANTASMA, the first feature of Joao Pedro Rodrigues, I had high expectations for TWO DRIFTERS. Unfortunately, it did not deliver. There were numerous problems, an implausible storyline and frustrating characters chief among them. It meandered far too much and ultimately ended on a ridiculous note. I recall reading favorable reviews of this film and was anxious to buy the DVD. I doubt it will remain in my library - it just wasn't terribly engaging and suggests Joao Pedro Rodrigues took far too formulaic a path in constructing this work both substantively and dramatically. I also feel the development and rather dark transformations of his two leads seemed to follow the same trajectory as his lead character in O FANTASMA. It just didn't resonate with me.
2 out of 4 people found this helpful.
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'Two drifters, off to see the world' from "Moon River"
Added 10/29/2006
Director João Pedro Rodrigues and writer Paulo Rebelo ('O Fantasma') collaborate again on this fascinating (if a bit frustrating) Portuguese film ODETE ('Two Drifters'). Together they have their own brand of surrealism and exploration of fantasies that seems to be developing into a smart new look for cinema. The very controversial 'O Fantasma' was dark and brooding, tearing open psyches like feral dogs along the slums of Portugal, whereas 'Two Drifters' is a work in the daylight that moves the concentration from men only to men and women - but the extremes of behavior are still in sharp focus.
The film opens with a very tender moment between handsome student Pedro (João Carreira) and his working boyfriend Rui (Nuno Gil): it is their anniversary but their individual obligations prevent them from spending more than a hasty goodbye, exchanging rings, and off goes Pedro in his car only to be killed in a crash. Devastated, Rui attends to Pedro and then to the horror of sitting by his casket during the wake before the funeral.
Flash into storyline two: the beautiful store skater Odete (Ana Cristina De Oliveira) lives with her lover Alberto (the hunky Carloto Cotta) but when she announces she would like to have a child, Alberto flees and Odete is left in depression over her plight. She just happens to be a neighbor of the recently dead Pedro and in her loneliness she attends Pedro's wake, follows the casket through the funeral and to the grave where she begins to obsess over the dead Pedro. She spends her time draped across his grave, fantasizes that she is pregnant by him and confronts Pedro's mother with the concept. She truly has pseudocyesis (false imagined hysterical pregnancy) and when it is an exposed condition she alters her appearance, cutting her hair and wearing Pedro's clothes and even convincing Pedro's mother to let her sleep in his bed. Ultimately Odete, now inhabiting the persona of Pedro, rejects Albert's return to her graces and instead enters into a bizarre arrangement with Rui.
The actors are all physically beautiful people, superbly cast to fit the models of the personalities of the story, and they manage to make this rather incredible tale credible. The film is rich in symbolism and metaphors, among them the title of the English version 'Two Drifters' - a phrase taken form the favorite fantasy song 'Moon River' that is the theme of Pedro's and Rui's relationship. There are some distorted sexual scenes and innuendoes that may be off-putting to some, but the inclusion works for the story. It is a tough little film but dazzling in its brave little way of taking chances, making us eager to see what João Pedro Rodrigues will do next! Grady Harp, October 06
3 out of 3 people found this helpful.
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Psychosis and Sex
Added 10/19/2006
Yet another gay-themed flick from the talented Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues. But whereas his previous effort (O FANTASMA, 2000) was dark, sexy (even pornographic, according to some), and creepily atmospheric, TWO DRIFTERS is bland, lacking in thematic coherence, and ultimately disappointing.
Because Rodrigues deals so much with dreams and sexual/psychotic fantasies in his work, one could potentially argue that the looseness of this particular film's narrative reflects its hidden themes and metaphors. But those themes and metaphors were already explored by Rodrigues in O FANTASMA, and better, so why bother with them again?
Without revealing too much of the plot, it should suffice to say that in TWO DRIFTERS, we see/follow the same basic premise as in O FANTASMA: a desperate human being (this time a woman) falls in love with a distant young man (this time he's distant because he's dead, not because he's unresponsive) and begins to exhibit the entire gamut of signs that any normal person out there will have no trouble diagnosing as sexual hysteria/obsession. She sleeps on top of the young man's grave, thinks she's pregnant with his baby, stalks his boyfriend (a guy with enough problems of his own), and, by the end, is almost entirely consumed by the dead young man's personality (she gets a haircut just like his; she starts wearing his old clothes; she fools his mother into letting her sleep in his bed, etc., etc., you get the idea).
Cinematically speaking, there is nothing breath-taking about this movie. Most scenes are long and repetitive; there is almost no nudity (which in the earlier film was a definite plus!); the acting is solid but not outstanding; the ending is annoyingly obscure (does she grow a male reproductive organ or something???); the juxtaposition of scenes is totally chaotic; the characters' behavior is totally unexplainable (one moment, they're getting laid, the other- they're slitting their wrists); the themes and metaphors (if there are any) are totally invisible (at least to this viewer), etc., etc.
If you want to satisfy your curiosity, rent it, but don't buy it: your money would be better spent on O FANTASMA.
6 out of 8 people found this helpful.
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