Really Surprised!

best movie i've ever seen.

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It's clear that Portuguese gay director João Pedro Rodrigues, whose Two Drifters (Odete, 2005) recently came to this country, is the extreme example of something. Is he making "the artiest queer stroke movie of the year" as Dennis Lim said in The Voice of his first effort? Is he "the most exciting new voice in the world today" or "a major and audacious new talent" as David Fear and Nathan Lee, respectively, have just declared in print? Or are his films "silly and overwrought," "both grueling and dull," "preposterous," "arbitrary," "pointless," "insufferable," "sudsy" – as several other critics have recently written? His new movie is highly allusive, and an admiring article* has listed his many presumable and declared influences, from Hitchcock to Fassbinder. But most of all he's just his own persistent, obsessive self, which is both his strength and his limitation. "Two Drifters" (using the English word) is what two young gay lovers have had engraved inside twin silver rings they exchange to commemorate a year together. One of them, Pedro (João Carreira) gets in his car, drives off, and is immediately in a fatal smash-up. A strange, tall girl named Odete (Cristina De Oliveira), who slept with the deceased, quickly develops an unhealthy obsession with him, which becomes the chief focus of the movie and which she continually dramatizes by throwing herself on his coffin and screaming and by humping his grave in the rain. She has a job at a supermarket that involves wearing roller skates. While she is acting out, drawing the sympathy of Pedro's mother, getting fired from the job, and developing a hysterical pregnancy, Pedro's lover, Rui (Nuno Gil) is imploding with ill-expressed grief that a Warhol-style steam bath blow job fails to assuage. The sequences show a strong visual sense. The framing is precise. David Fear feels that Douglas Sirk's "hyperventilating melodramas inform every frame of Rodrigues' irony-soaked opera." If so, the style that results is still even more remote from the period and mood of Sirk than Todd Haynes' overrated, anachronistic Far from Heaven, and if this movie's irony-soaked (and one would hope so), the humor is hard to grasp. Certainly it's rain-soaked too, and steeped alternately in bright sunlight and nighttime shadow. Since Odete, now equipped with an expensive pram, practically moves into Pedro's grave, and Rui is afraid to go there, they don't meet much at first except when Rui drags Odete off of Pedro's coffin at the time of the funeral. She's big and tall, but he's hunky, and so equal to the task. Eventually they do meet again at the grave, and now that Odete has begun to channel Pedro and wear his clothes and haircut, a strange reincarnation takes place. There's another man who's also had sex with Odete but she kicks him out. He seems to be involved for little reason other than one: he has a perfect body, which we get to see every inch of. Rodrigues' concern with the physical comes with an unwillingness to delve into the motivations or personalities or backgrounds of his characters. Rodrigues is stingy with dialogue. His earlier O Fantasma, an obsessive S&M tale involving an ultra-handsome but mentally unhealthy garbage collector, is almost wordless. Two Drifters relies on the beautiful framing of its images, and on the symbolic use of the sound of rain and wind as well as syrupy songs like Banjo Moon and Moon River and loops of Mancini. Maybe Sirk and Fassbinder are influences, as reviewers have suggested. But while extreme melodrama and gay concerns may link him with other directors of similar bent, Rodrigues' strength is that he's working on his own. He is true to his own peculiar obsessions and he lets nothing get in the way of following them through. Since he's working nearby, it might be worth considering that he's been affected by Almodóvar. There's something of the Spanish master in Odete's persistence, her willingness to assume a masculine role. The trouble is that Rodrigues' "elliptical cuts" not only interrupt the "transgressive trance" as Lim said of O Fantasma, but simply slow down the action, here as well. The director isn't good at pacing. The writer who said that when both lovers start getting suicidal you wish they'd hurry up with it was not far wrong. Watching Two Drifters is a claustrophobic experience, a challenging exercise in sitting still. But Fear and Lee aren't completely crazy. This filmmaker is worth following for his sense of craft and tradition and for the rigorous way he cleaves to his own concerns. *"Double 'O'Heaven: The Vertigo Pop and Phantom Desires of João Pedro Rodrigues" by Johnny Ray Houston in Cinemascope.

Joao Rodrigues' latest appears to have a bigger budget than "O Fantasma." The photography is better, the color is more eye-catching. And he certainly does know how to pick mouthwateringly sexy guys for his casts. But just as he was mesmerized by garbage in "O Fantasma", he's morosely taken up in "Odete" by a wake and the necrophiliac attentions to a young man's embalmed corpse by the poor fellow's "crazy lady" neighbor and by his boyfriend, both of whom later become nauseatingly attached to the young man's gravesite. The finale is reminiscent of the climax of "The Grifters" but that scene made sense. The last minutes of "Odete" are grotesque and poor in credibility.Certainly, this movie is original and Rodrigues is a very talented auteur. But to succeed as art, a painful piece like "Odete" needs to be more than intensely depressing. Jim Smith

It had an original script and for a Portuguese film it is pretty good!And love the soundtrack ! The actors were really good and the ghost of "Pedro", even if it wasn't explicitly on the screen, the director made it that the audience could feel it! It was a surprising and shocking movie, but really well done!And the end is definitely a big shock and surprise!Of all the characters, "Rui" played by the actor Nuno Gil, was excellent and the most touchable to the audience, and remarkably the one we had more feelings about!Ana Cristina Oliveira was good as "Odete", but when she reincarnates in "Pedro", when she dress the jeans we have that "dejá vu" on the Levis' store publicity clip she had made!

I wasn't really going to comment, but then I figured I had something to say. I saw this film two days ago and, although I think it's not a complete waste of time (it might have been of money though, for the producers), it's obvious it has serious problems. It's got really good cinematography and (little but) nice music. A lot has been said about Ana Cristina Oliveira but, let's be honest, over what? She is not really an actress an she balances permanently between over-acting and preposterous under-acting. Her performance passes for good because there has never been anyone like Odete in any other film: crazy? sad? childlike? an impostor? no one knows, fellows. So she's kinda sorta dictating the rules here.I thought this film was also a good example of the problem most Portuguese films suffer from: soundtrack. There is a permanent NO to dubbing and the result is this usual mass of noise that comes out of the blue. People in other countries may think Portugal is the noisiest of places. What thrilled me though, was that some of the dialog was dubbed but it didn't necessarily solve the syndrome. Bad dubbing too, I must say. It's strange to watch a film in which the first thing that strikes my mind on the first scene, when the first character speaks is: it's dubbed. And all this to say that the film has technical problems.It also has script problems. It tries to be classical from the first to the last scene. There was a desperate fear of leaving things suspended and that shows. The writer was obviously trying to get everything straight and he does but... it shows!! All dialog is too expositive and there isn't one single piece of talk that sounds like a line from a film. It's all a little raw and slightly unpleasant.Not that the film is a total mess, I must stress. I just think the good parts are so obvious that I prefer to concentrate on the bad ones.Direction brings little to the weak screenplay. All shots are classical and un-innovative, but their beautiful. Great work from Rui Poças, by the way.Now, what I think was THE problem, the one that keeps people from believing this story and laugh throughout the film instead of taking it seriously: The guy who plays the guy who DIES is obviously not an actor. Actually, It's a rather important role and I can't see why non-actors are cast for such parts. This guy is neither an actor nor a good-looking man. Which means the whole film rolls down the mountain, since we never believe for one second that this gorgeous woman is obsessed with him even though he's gone, and that his hunky lover who survives is actually having a bad time getting over the loss, when all we see of this character is apathy. Too bad. The world is full of beautiful people who even happen to be nice seductive lovers. The world is full of good actors who are also cute boys and capable of causing obsessions on people after they's gone. The world is full of great films and also of not that great films. C'est la vie!