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Director: João Pedro Rodrigues
Screenplay: João Pedro Rodrigues,
José Neves, Paulo Rebelo and Alexandre Melo
Cast: Ricardo Meneses as Sérgio; Beatriz
Torcato as Fátima; Andre Barbosa as João; Eurico Vieira as Virgilio
[Full Spoilers Ahead]
In mind that for many people,
life is a cruel existence of constant yearning, I've probably developed a
greater ability to follow protagonists in cinema who could be entirely duplicitous
or even evil, but the experience in the best of cinema can be a trail to map
their obsessions and the route leading to their downfalls and experiences. Even
if the plot is minimal, it's at least with a logic that has meaning for them. In
the case of Sérgio, protagonist of Portugeuse director João Pedro Rodrigues' debut, his particular yearning is a sexual
one, the garbage collector desensitized by even a hook-up and BJ by another man
in a urinal. Even when he gets into the strange erotic experience of masturbating
a cop handcuffed in a car, it's only because he's abruptly encountered the
sight and is curious.
O Fantasma isn't a "nice" film, a reminder that the wave
of LGBTQ cinema of yore had teeth, a necessity felt from the likes of Kenneth
Anger up to bisexual director Gregg
Araki's Teen Apocalypse films, all in many ways reminding the viewers that
the life of a gay man is not a one-dimensional construct. (The same for gay
female filmmakers, though the fact that their work feels still maligned at
times is frustrating). Admittedly, a film like O Fantasma starts immediately with a sharpness that will
immediately make or break the film, where a leather gimp is shunting a
handcuffed man from behind as a dog is pawing at the closed doo outside in the
corridor, the film become even more transgressive and dark as it goes. As a heterosexual
man, I am aware I am an outside looking in the metaphorical window, always in
danger of distorting the image a gay viewer has more to be concerned of in
interpreting, but it can probably be agreed upon that when we delve into the
life of this anti-hero, a guy completely disconnected from the world barring a
vague stimulus, his journey has a weight. The tangent from finds Speedos in the
garbage he likes rubbing against himself to wandering a landfill on all fours
in the aforementioned homemade gimp outfit is felt with having a logic to him
even if that's bizarre to write as a journey in one sentence.
Another particular obsession is
this rise in an idiosyncratic type of world cinema, very relaxed paces but yet
to meet the post-Michael Haneke style
of minimal filmmaking, instead a very idiosyncratic verisimilitude I grew into
cinema with through the mid 2000s onwards. Films that are closer in looser
plotting and introspective to novels, and have a realism in shooting on
location, but had a tendency growing up for me, no matter no country of origin
and similar production styles, of always being unpredictable, a wonderful richness
in how they could never be signposted in clichés and that, not in this case but
found in Rodrigues' The Ornithologist (2016), not afraid to
enter magical realism or full blown surrealism. They also could be
transgressive, O Fantasma somewhat
early to the controversies the likes of Carlos
Reygadas would get to in the mid 2000s but around the proto- era with a
character in Sérgio who isn't exactly like an open book. He's a young man who
has a love-hate relationship with Fátima, the young female member of the
garbage collection team that is almost entirely male, her physical
attractiveness confounded by a potential romantic rivalry with their boss, with
the added complication that a) Sérgio is gay, or at least more attracted to sex
on a raw level to anyone but Fátima, and b) more closer to the group's station
dog in terms of friendliness.
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| From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/P349Z7C1YG8/maxresdefault.jpg |
Filmmaking wise, this is a muted, down-to-earth production which I commonly connect to an international style as mentioned a few paragraphs ago. This is from what I gather Rodrigues' most down-to-earth work in stylistic aesthetic; O Fantasma is proudly grotesque instead to a deliberately provocative style that contrasts these strange events we see with a logic. Mainly that the world of Portuguese urban life looks dull, Sérgio literally a nocturnal figure who comes out in the light out of work with no defined time where he sleeps. So comfortable in dirt from his job, he finds clothing like a black thong in the garbage and takes them home to festishised and wear unwashed, an ordinary thin and handsome guy who looks like anyone, whose compassion is shown in how he loves the dog, but is utterly disconnected from all. Even, as mention, sex in a bathroom is abruptly ended for him because he cannot gain anything from it.
Hence, he eventually becomes a
literal phantom, culminating over the tensions he encounters, the film wilfully
touching upon the idea of sexual violence from one male to another but as a
fantasy, an even more taboo concept the older the film becomes, handcuffs and
extreme fantasies played with. The film shows no judgement, doesn't damn or
praise, merely depicts and you the viewer are forced to make up your mind on,
which I see as the other virtue of world cinema into the Millennium. Eventually
our protagonist ends up in a landfill, lucky enough to have created a costume
that can allow him to relieve himself but doesn't have pockets for food in its
skin tight nature, forcing him to catch a rabbit to sustain himself, drink
muddy water in a ditch even if it's likely the cause of him puking later, all
felt without a sense of a man degrading himself but someone who snapped, the
tensions at work against his own little world merely colliding.
Is it all worth it? Yes, in mind
I have viewed this type of world cinema less in terms of plot narrative but
that it merely was a backbone for mood and introspective chamber pieces,
subconscious narratives inside our casts' heads onscreen. Certainly in the
small but growing filmography of João
Pedro Rodrigues, who sadly isn't a hugely known figure despite carving a
name in the small canon of prominent known Portuguese filmmakers, has never
clearly cared for conventionality. Instead, he willingly deals with characters thrown
into scenarios which deal with sexuality and in an existential state, taking to
a greater point in The Ornithologist in
how a secular ornithologist ends up on a spiritual journey through surreal
vignettes, even to the point he transforms into the director himself playing
the same character, literally taking its prangs of thought and placing them directly
onto himself in a way that offers me a chance to be even more empathetic to him
as an artist willing to bare himself.
Obviously, I wish these films
were more easily available, but what I see by luck (and MUBI's streaming services) is to keep treasured, even when seeing a
gimp in a cavernous industrial work area taking a dump isn't conventional
Saturday night viewing imagery. Far from tasteless and problematic, human if
profane is the best word to describe this film, philosophical regardless of a
viewer's sexuality and gender. That it's still provocative to this day, and
never in a way that's trying too hard to shock, is also a virtue that I wish
was more common, something to be learnt from in this film.
Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Provocative/Sensual
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
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