O Fantasma

`O Fantasma' is definitely a disturbing movie. After seeing it, surely you will leave the movie theater thoughtful, impressed and full of pessimism. A movie that makes you think about loneliness in the big urban areas. A story that may be happening outside your house, while you live a comfortable life inside. It is a lonely world that belongs to the night, to the shadows, making part of the underground of the big cities. Once belonging to this world, it seems that its habitants are deteriorated into indigent human beings, who lose their names, homes and origins.

The movie tells the story of Sergio who works at night as a garbage collector on a big city. He lives alone with his dog - and that introduces you into a universe where man and animal live under merged boundary conditions. Sergio is a lonely guy. Homosexual, he keeps himself away from a female job colleague who is always flirting with him. He has no lover, family or friends. But he seems to be always in the company of an enormous desire, which will conflict with his own loneliness.

Loneliness and desire summarise Sergio's reality and push him into a primitive world, where man becomes animal. The protagonist tries to consume his strong sexual desire through anonymous, casual and wild sex. Thus, it is on the dark corners, public toilets and other filthy places where Sergio tries to satisfy his sexual impulse. But the promiscuity of those moments does not appear to satisfy him, since his desire leads him to the figure of an attractive swimmer guy. A guy who lives in one of the districts that Sergio runs into his night shifts, during his journey of work and garbage. That hard and solitary reality makes desire becomes obsession. Apparently, a single motivation only exists: search the young guy, peeping, observing him from distance and getting touch with an opposite environment.

But Sergio seems to be conducted to an unavoidable end: a curious reversal process of the Human evolution. From human being, he seems to revert through a trail that takes him to some animal condition. As if loneliness and desire would lead to the most primitive stage of mankind. The anti-evolution process transforms him in an irrational creature: he eats, drinks, urinates and evacuates as an animal. It is when Sergio abandons his man's part and, protected by black latex clothes, ruptures with the present and starts roaming on an urban world like an animal guided by his instincts only.

A frightening scenario, result from a contemporaneous reality - at same time empty, isolated and cruel. And that victimized Sergio.

What begins as a story of a homosexual young scavenger in the streets of Lisbon ends like an almost surreal wandering of a cartoon character amid images of litter and desolate sceneries. The sequences of the first half of the movie seem to show the young man's lonely course, obsessed by the love of men's bodies and motorbikes and feeling equally excited when he caresses any of them. His only friend is the dog which goes everywhere with him. This first half although made of a lot of fragmentary scenes some of them very crude and hard core, has some meaning by showing in acceptable realistic terms the young man's obsessive course. But in my opinion the final scenes twist that meaning and change something psychologically real and authentic into some rare pathologic anomaly of the mind which devalues the whole story a lot. The movie has however some value because of the convincing visual harshness of scenes in its first half, combining in a somewhat symbolic way the real garbage the scavengers have to collect with the filthy obsessions in the main character's mind in a series of simultaneously uncommon and sordid but real scenes.

I've seen this film twice--once at the cinema and about a year later, on DVD. I too wondered if something had been cut from the film--there is an abrupt transition about three-quarters of the way through that is jarring. As a psychologist, I see this as a work of art that functions, like a dream, to take the viewer into the inner self of the protagonist as well into one's own inner self. While a dream can change scenes abruptly and without logical transitions, the logical mind is still at work as we watch a film, and an illogical or unexplained transtion can actually be distracting, as I found it to be in this film. One further question--or criticism about the editing or story line--the film opens with its climactic scene at the very beginning, involving Sergio, the protagonist, and the object of his obsessive desire. It is extremely erotic and disturbing and putting it right at the beginning--it is never returned to--leaves one with a sense of incompleteness at the end of the film. That said, I found the film to be extraordinarily truthful psychologically, just as our deepest fantasies are truthful--its explicitness was entirely appropriate and not pornographic. The essence of pornography is denial of feeling, but the film is saturated with feeling. The extraordinary beauty of the lead actor will evoke in the viewer either empathy or desire or both--and one admires his willingness to play his role with all stops out and with utter dedication.

Definitely worth seeing.

There is a missing piece of continuity, which the director's commentary ignores by claiming that the last third of the film is fantasy. It would be a spoiler to say what it is, but I found the transition dishonest. Worse, one learns from the commentary that every young male auditioning for the lead part had to do the solo masturbatory shower scene; hundreds did so until finding Ricardo, who was perfect. I am sure there was much enjoyment for the director to watch the auditions, but the horror comes at the sexual exploitation of Ricardo, made clear in the commentary. The director declined to use the actor again, because his body was "used up", leaving Ricardo to move back to live and farm with his mother. The director treats Ricardo as his character Sergio treats his sexual objects, controlling, and then abandoning them. I grieve for Ricardo.

Unlike the other reviewer of this movie, I thought it was a stunner. Yes, it's odd, and yes, it's shot in a lot of darkness, but I think it works. It's like a parable -- simplified, cut to the bone. We know little about the protagonist, or why he does why he does; we're just told the story, in all its bizarrerie. He seems more like a dog than a human (as his growling etc shows), but there's no pop-psychology here, no explanations, just the story of his movement into ever darker depths of bestial behaviour. It's not light, but it is extremely sexy -- the scene where he puts on a pair of old motorcycle gloves, salvaged from the garbage he collects by day, and starts to caress himself sends a shiver down the spine. Other scenes are more brutally direct, but the movie's lack of coyness makes it as refreshing as it is disquieting. I found it riveting.