O fantasma

After I saw this movie here in Lisbon, I walked down the street (actually, this street appears in the movie), from the theater to the subway. It was nighttime. "QUENCH YOUR THIRST!" was scribbled in black graffiti in one of the walls of the station. This is a masterpiece.

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.

What no one seems to find in the film is the gradual regression of the hero to a canine level. We begin with his attachment to his dog as the only keen affection in his life -- they kiss, fondle, etc. Like the dog, Sergio tends to judge and eventually express his erotic energy through smell (e.g. the scene where he licks the shower wall), and at the end he is wandering the heaps of refuse poking and smelling at random, as the dog does.

His sexual hunger is probably to be passively possessed, but his culture and friends may demand a more active role. Yet he never finds satisfaction in such a role -- he rebuffs the fellow who's going down on him in the toilet -- and one imagines that what he really wants from the hunky motorcycle driver is to be assaulted and possessed by him. His loneliness and social anomie, as well as his undefined erotic drives, send him down a spiral of dehumanizing impulses until he seems to have forsaken any recognizably human responses.

It's an interesting and original film fantasy (I agree with the comment that "eye candy", perhaps the editor's addition,indicates a pornographic intent) but too simply developed to challenge your imagination.

`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.

O FANTASMA is not a movie for the casual audience. This dark and seamy vision of sexual confusion is almost unremittingly harrowing, but director Joao Pedro Rodriques drives his vision of a young lad (who lives on the periphery of society and longs to be wanted and loved, even in the 'forbidden world' of same sex attraction) from reality to surreality.

Metaphors abound: the hero works in garbage disposal on the night shift - a stance that sums up his world's view of his persona. Apparently the actor Ricardo Meneses was selected for the lead simply on the basis of his presence and his animal appeal.

This is a rich performance of a boy with an approach/avoidance to his sexuality and Meneses is unafraid to bear it all in his portrayal of passion on the edge. The drive for sexual gratification is dark, sensuous, and bordering on dangerous. His eventual transformation as a 'comic book-like' predator seems natural in the way both director and actor drive this story to its inevitable ending.

The film is VERY dark photographically and while this technique matches the message (this is a story about life in the night), it is difficult at times to visualize the action. The noisy musical scoring becomes almost unbearable at times. But despite these reservations O FANTASMA suggests the debut of a remarkable directorial talent and certainly gives heed to a major screen presence in Ricardo Meneses! Not for everyone, but for those with an eye for something original then try this little film. In Portuguese with subtitles