Two Drifters

TWO DRIFTERS   ***

João Pedro Rodrigues

2005

IDEA:  Rui and Odete are drawn together after the former's boyfriend is killed in an auto accident, and Odete becomes obsessed with the dead man, whom she never knew.

BLURB:  If nothing else, the early films of João Pedro Rodrigues are among the cinema’s clearest illustrations of Freudian concepts. As in O Fantasma, here the director conveys the sinuous, agonized circuit of erotic desire as a series of displacements, with an absent object “reconstituted” via fetishistic substitutions that descend into perversity. Two Drifters ups the ante, figuring this scenario in a blackly comic melodramatic pastiche, alluding to everything from Douglas Sirk to The Lord of the Rings, with a healthy dose of Vertigo and, in explicit appearances, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Rodrigues lifts a time-honored trope - the haunting, specifically of a former lover - and imbues it with both queer metaphysical dimensions and a deadpan, self-aware absurdism. If Two Lovers is still, despite its archly overripe turns of event, a pretty predictable movie, one can chalk that up to the influence of psychoanalysis, and the ways in which Rodrigues draws upon its rules and patterns to deliver Rui and Odete to the natural “fulfillment” of their intersecting drives. In the process, Two Drifters gets at the inherent fluidity and reversibility of self and other, uncovering a universal desire to both possess and be possessed. “Well something’s lost, but something’s gained,” goes the lyric from “Both Sides Now,” heard early in the film. In Rodrigues’ psychosexual burlesque, such a sentiment takes on another loaded meaning.