Odete (2005) Reviews

• hysteria collides with despair

  tnwestlake2006-02-07

  The thrust of this story is so odd as to stretch credibility almost to the point of crumbling, but Rodrigues just about managed to keep me on board, with a clear, almost ritual, exposition of the two characters' stories, before they start to entwine in a bizarre cocktail of obsession and distress. The overall feel is that of Greek tragedy, an excruciating inevitability that helps to accept, unlikely as it may seem, the final scene where the male lead is sodomised by the female, while the ghost of his now-dead boyfriend looks on (I kid you not). A brief outline of the plot will give you an idea of just how strange this film is: Rui and Pedro have been in love for a year - they've just exchanged rings and the future is full of plans, but then Pedro is killed in a car crash. In another part of Lisbon, Odete works in the local supermarket and is going out with Alberto, one of the security guards. She starts to get broody to the point of obsession and, when Alberto refuses to have a child with her, she throws him out. Up to now, were still in a normal film, but Odete gatecrashes Pedro's funeral and the weirdness begins. She steals Pedro's ring (by sucking it off his finger, in a scene not devoid of necrophiliac undertones - at this point any doubts about her instability are completely dispelled), claims she's carrying Pedro's child and begins to insinuate herself into Rui's life by implying an almost supernatural connection with Pedro. When the pregnancy turns out to be phantom - or faked, we're never really sure and in any case, no-one in the film really takes it seriously - she persues her obsession by subsuming Pedro's personality and manipulating Rui into an acceptance of her as a substitute for his dead lover. While the film may appear some kind of freudian horror story, the core remains very human: Odete is as lost as Rui and never really convincing as the reincarnation of Pedro. Her gauche efforts in this respect tend to alleviate the creeping sense of evil that permeates her manipulation of Rui, who can only accept such a sham because of his overriding need to sublimate Pedro's death. Rodrigues leaves much open to interpretation: just how conscious is Odete of what she is doing to Rui? just how far is Rui taken in by her? His refusal to comment leads me to think he's suggesting it doesn't really matter: here we have two people taking the same road to meet two different needs, which can be said of a great many love stories. The film is sound enough in its technical aspects (acting, photography, etc.) to carry the story, so I'd recommend a look if you get the chance.

• 'Two drifters, off to see the world' from "Moon River"

  gradyharp2006-10-29

  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 pseudosiesis (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 innuendos 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

• High-strung obsessions from Portugal

  Chris Knipp2006-06-28

  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.

• Unpleasant

  jsmith14802006-06-23

  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

• Bad Necrophilia

  nycritic2006-11-21

  I tried. I really did. I thought that maybe, if I gave Joao Pedro Rodrigues another chance, I could enjoy his movie. I know that after seeing O FANTASMA I felt ill and nearly disgusted to the core, but some of the reviews were quite good and in favor, so I was like, "What the hell. At least you didn't pay 10 dollars at the Quad. Give it a shot." Sometimes it's better to go to your dentist and ask for a root canal without any previous anesthetic to alleviate the horror of so much pain. I often wonder if it wouldn't be better to go back to my childhood and demand my former bullies to really let me have it. On other occasions, I often think that the world is really flat and that if I sail away far enough, I will not only get away from it all, but fall clear over, and that some evil, Lovecraftian thing will snatch me with its 9000 tentacles and squeeze the life -- and some french fries from 1995, still lingering inside my esophagus -- out of me. Is there a reason for Odete? I'd say not at all... just that maybe her Creator thought that writing a story centered on her madness (one that makes Alex Forrest look like Strawberry Shortcake) look not only creepy, but flat-out sick to the bone. She first of all decides to leave her present boyfriend (in shrieking hysterics) because she wants a child and he believes they're too young. She later crashes a funeral of a gay man, and -- get this -- in order to get closer to him, she feigns being pregnant while insinuating herself into the lives of the dead man's mother and lover in the sickest of ways. Oh, of course, she shrieks like a banshee and throws herself not one, but a good three times on his grave. And there's this ridiculous business that she progressively becomes "Pedro" which sums up some weak-as-bad-tea explanation that love knows no gender. Or something. I'd say she's as nuts as a can of cashews, unsalted. But then again, so's the director. And me, for taking a chance on this. At least the men look good. Other than that... not much else to see here.