O fantasma

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.

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.