Double ‘O’ Heaven: The Vertigo Pop and Phantom Desires of João Pedro Rodrigues

By Johnny Ray Huston

When cruising the movies of João Pedro Rodrigues, maybe it’s best to start with a pair of blowjobs.

Number one, in Rodrigues’ 2000 debut feature O Fantasma, is notable because it is graphic in a casual sense, and because the lucky but throwaway character who drops to his knees before Sergio (Ricardo Meneses) in some Lisbon bathroom is only joining the director in paying tribute to nonactor and star Meneses’ extreme beauty. The second, in this year’s Odete, is less hardcore, yet hotter—it takes place in a steam room, after all—and a definite sign of Rodrigues’ development as a filmmaker. As the camera slowly creeps forward, moving above the roused crotch of Rui (Nuno Gil) to stare closely and sustainedly at his expression, the shot overtly recalls a major queer cinema touchstone, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (1963). Audaciously, Rodrigues doesn’t merely mimic his influence, he attempts to outdo him. Whereas the face of the man in Warhol’s film is unreadable beyond evidence of pleasure, Rodrigues sets sight on the emotion submerged within sexuality, the way buried grief can be glimpsed through the cracks of an orgasmic grimace.

 Odete ’s very first sequence is another place to begin when noting this director’s bold assertiveness in relation to famed artistic forefathers and funny uncles. The sequence opens with an embrace and ends with a very different one. In between, Rui and his love Pedro (João Carreira) tease each other and exchange a goodbye that fate quickly seems to change from casual to final. There are strong, simple musical ingredients: the tender femme-haunted foreshadowing of Greg Brown’s “Banjo Moon,” the bad tidings of a techno samba take on “ Moon River ,” Pedro and Rui’s favorite song. And there is highly stylized, choreographed action: a CPR kiss that yields a gush of blood; grief-stricken sobs that seem to provoke a sudden downpour. In terms of melodramatic impact, it all calls to mind the equally wet death sequence at the beginning of All About My Mother (1999). But Rodrigues’ approach, while just as bravura, isn’t quite so florid.

This commanding prelude just might be upstaged by the very next scene. Against the bright white light of a supermarket aisle, the word ODETE appears in flaring red capital letters. The text fades, and then—to a swooning flourish of strings—the film’s skinny-limbed title character roller-skates into view, all six-plus feet of her.

Movie introductions don’t come much more memorable than the one Ana Cristina de Oliveira receives in Odete, and her Jolie-gone-feral appearance proves that Rodrigues hasn’t lost his knack for finding physically stunning people to build a shot and ultimately a world around. Still, the radical use of music, the way those strings gather and release all the sorrow of the preceding scene, makes the deepest impression. Rodrigues takes a seemingly incidental background tune—Andy Williams covering “Both Sides Now”—and utterly transforms it through dramatic presentation. It’s the spine-shivering opposite of typical soundtrack product placement: in Rodrigues’ hands, Muzak attains operatic power.

 Odete is more methodical in terms of shot composition than Rodrigues’ sprawling first feature. When O Fantasma emerged, I labeled it Trash Narcissus, in reference to James Bidgood’s obsessive tribute to the splendor of a young Bobby Kendall. But whereas even the rotten city-porn ghetto sequence of Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus (1971) was filmed inside the director’s apartment, Rodrigues’ realist attentiveness trades the mirrored boudoirs and sapphire jungles that come with such extreme artifice for the real dirt and grime found on the borderline between city and country. Ultimately, O Fantasma’s subject isn’t narcissism so much as obsessive desire directed outward as well as inward. Since the heyday of Fred Halsted and Wakefield Poole, I can’t think of another film that has explored the sexual compulsion common to urban gay life so directly and at such length.

Scandalizing conservative viewers when it premiered in Venice , O Fantasma doesn’t fit anyone’s traditional idea of a state-funded film. If government money supported such a work in the US , Donald Wildmon’s head would explode, and Jesse Helms might finally meet his maker. Nor does Rodrigues’ first full-length movie—after a dramatic short (Happy Birthday , 1997) and two documentaries (Viagem à expo , 1998;O pastor , 1998)—adhere to the literary roots favored by Manoel de Oliveira, whom many might identify as the representative of Portuguese film. In its literal dedication to carnal prowls through urban realms, O Fantasma makes one shadowy man of Lisbon a counterpart to the Taipei father-and-son somnambulists of The River (1997), whose director Rodrigues admires. Meneses’ imperious charms and roving spirit also call the Terence Stamp of Teorema (1968) to mind. Today, according to the IMDb, Meneses has returned to his childhood town of Fuz Coa to help his mother run a family farm. There are no other films on his resume. Not so with the star of Odete, who has caught the attention of Michael Mann—and awarded a role in his Miami Vice—since completing the film.

 Odete does share certain distinctive traits with the divisive and relatively hermetic O Fantasma. Both announce themselves with bold crimson credits. Aside from rare moments of glaring fluorescence—at a swimming pool in O Fantasma, a supermarket in Odete—Rodrigues and cinematographer Rui Po ç as often immerse themselves in blackness. Whereas most filmmakers can’t wait to alter the night with a variety of bright lights, these two explore its naturalistic textures.

Likewise, the costumes and set design offset or reflect these dark shadows with a fetishist’s array of vividly colored items. In O Fantasma, many of them—Sergio’s bright yellow garbageman’s gear, a cop uniform, a torn Speedo, a latex bodysuit harking back to Les vampires (1915) and Irma Vep (1996)—carry sexual connotations. In Odete, they are romantic talismans attached to the deceased Pedro, from his striped soccer shirts to funereal flowers that resemble ripped chunks of flesh. Moving through stages of grief, Rui shifts from the black of mourning to bloody valentine colours. Chancing upon a vision of his lost beloved as Alex Chilton chokes out “I saw you” on the soundtrack, he’s bathed in the light in the stop sign; later, sprawled across his bed and lost in an endless loop of Mancini, his red underwear matches his guitar. If the latter tableaux verges on the pretty vacancy of fashion or advertisement, the narrative that frames it adds a psychological depth.

Aside from a closing-credits blast of “Dream Baby Dream,” O Fantasma’s descent into sexual obsession was nearly music-free, which makes its highly original and emotional deployment in Odete—Big Star, Bright Eyes, Scala’s children’s choir take on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and multiple “Moon River”s ring bells—doubly startling. Likewise, the previously somewhat solemn Rodrigues finds visual comedy in a ring sucked off a corpse’s finger (yet more oral action), a crazed leap into an open grave, or a late-night trip of a “mother” to the cemetery in black with matching stroller. (If Talk to Her [2002] is Almodovar’s “Girlfriend in a Coma,” then Odete is Rodrigues asking one to meet him at the “Cemetry Gates.”) At the heart of it all is Odete, a character who explodes the ugly term fag hag through the sheer force of her profanely spiritual insistence that she’s pregnant with a dead gay man’s child.

One might say that Odete’s impulses are written on the wind, to invoke both one of Rodrigues’ chief directorial influences—to whom he pays tribute more imaginatively and subtly than Todd Haynes—as well as its quite literal application to numerous scenes in the film: throughout, gusts alternately accompany or seem to provoke this wild child’s looniest acts. Rodrigues spells out Odete’s personality early on, when she throws her boyfriend out on his attractive bare ass after demanding a baby and turns to a Snoopy doll for comfort (her embrace of it a mocking echo of Pedro and Rui’s final hug a few minutes earlier). The beagle’s pal Woodstock looks down from a poster on her wall, then a sudden breeze blows through Odete’s window, directing her gaze outside, where Pedro’s despondent mother ducks into a funereal car. The little girl who wants a little boy has found her calling.

And down will come baby. Taking aim at het breeder and gay marriage sentimentality, the events that follow can be interpreted as black comic ingredients—a satire of both liberal sexual and conservative religious codes. But they can also be taken at face value: Odete is undeniably a spiritual film. As such, it is a mystic tale: spectral reflections of Odete—in mirrors, or more often, windows—sometimes dominate the frame more than the flesh-and-blood woman herself. But Rodrigues primarily performs a juggling routine of sorts with romantic symbols and religious iconography. The camera gazes down from a God’s-eye view at very particular moments, such as when Odete (whose name, as Dennis Lim has observed, brings Ordet [1955] and Mouchette [1967] to mind) lights votive candles around—and sleeps atop—Pedro’s grave at night, or when she places Pedro’s ring on one of Rui’s pillows. The new Pope may not approve of such rituals, but anyone with a heart or a sense of humour will.

Undoubtedly, Rodrigues is attracted to characters that disobey conventional mores. Odete shares the impulsiveness of O Fantasma’s Sergio, whose nocturnal adventures traverse a domain far beyond the comparatively tame and more self-aware public naughtiness found in the works of Rodrigues’ better-known contemporary François Ozon, not to mention the unimaginative hetero-clone courtship codes of contemporary commercial gay film. At times, Rodrigues overtly links the two characters, as when Odete, escaping from a hospital’s mental ward, prowls along train tracks and architectural edges with a lithe animalism. The sound of dogs barking accompanies both protagonists, though Oliveira’s gleefully devious features—a bit like a female counterpart to experimental filmmaker Jose Luis Rodriguez’s untamed looks—are perhaps more feline than canine.

When Rodrigues passed through San Francisco during O Fantasma’s festival travels, visits to many of the locations in Vertigo (1958) were high on his agenda, and it’s safe to say that he’s now constructed an excellent if minor 21st century filmic answer to that masterpiece, one that ends on a note of daffy optimism rather than tragic pessimism. Odete’s unique final shot proves that Rodrigues is as deft at serving up vivid endings as he is at crafting memorable beginnings. No longer claiming to be possessed by Pedro’s child, Odete seems possessed by the ghost of Pedro himself, a point that—anatomy be damned—she tries to drive home to a seemingly receptive Rui on his bed.

Warhol, Almodovar, Sirk, Hitchcock, Tsai, Pasolini, Bresson, Dreyer, Feuillade. These are mighty big cards for any cineaste to carry in his deck, and Rodrigues doesn’t always play them for maximum effect, or subjugate them in a way that allows his own auteurist impulses to reign. O Fantasma’s dedication to Sergio’s days and nights can be frustrating and even tedious because of the character’s emotionally remote quality. Odete’s back-and-forth between the title character’s crazed rituals and Rui’s dazed mourning verges on overly schematic, and when the two storylines begin to bleed into one another, the dialogue (“You frighten me”) and performances occasionally verge on a parody of European art film.

Yet has any recent European art film presented sexuality with the multi-faceted candour and unashamed flair for visual pleasure characteristic of Rodrigues’ two features to date? The explicit moments within recent works by Catherine Breillat, Bruno Dumont, and Gaspar No é , for example, either adopt mock-shock dramatic tactics, an air of moral severity, or both. “The human body is made of human parts. Why shouldn’t you show that?” Rodrigues told me during an interview in 2001. Thus far he’s chanced upon some amazing bodies to display. He’s still finding his way as a dramatist, but even in his relatively discreet new film’s final sex act, he’s revealing much more than you’ll find in porn’s psychologically and spiritually stunted rulebooks. Just as Warhol might envy Odete’s blowjob, Fassbinder would applaud its final image of buttfucking.

Odete

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