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.

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.

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

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.

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.