Just what I expected

hyped garbage

Captivating movie !

The acting in this movie is really good.

The grimness of the pre-credit sequence of Joao Pedro Rodrigues' "Two Drifters" isn't maintained though what follows is hardly a barrel of laughs. This is a film about people who are emotionally damaged and who are overwhelmed by grief. Odete, (Ana Cristina De Oliveira), is the beautiful but lonely girl who works in a supermarket and longs to have a baby. Rui, (Nuno Gil), is the young gay man she meets at the wake of his lover, Pedro, and who holds himself responsible for Pedro's death and nothing is quite what it appears to be on the surface.For example, Odete is far from a conventional heroine. Her neuroses, indeed you might even say her madness, doesn't make her particularly sympathetic and her relationship with Pedro is never really explained. Rui, on the other hand, despite all his guilt, is the more empathetic of the two characters and it is he, rather than Odete, we root for.Because of the darkness of the subject matter this isn't an easy film to like but Rodrigues handles the material beautifully and all the performances are first-rate. It never really saw the light of day and has largely disappeared and while it strictly doesn't fall into the category of New Queer Cinema it is, nevertheless, a welcome addition to what I would consider 'gay-themed' cinema.

I just cannot find the right words to describe how much "Odete/Two Drifters" suffers from having the writer as the director of the film. Perhaps another director or an editor could have straightened out this nonsense and made it intriguing. As it is, this film should not have seen the light of day. I actually found it insulting that the writer/director served up this trash with a straight face and expected the audience to applaud. The film simply lacks any cogent story beyond the initial tragedy. Once Odete enters the frame, the film slowly veers off the tracks of credibility until it is completely air-born. The film ends abruptly, as if slamming directly into the ground, with an ending so ridiculous that I actually felt slapped in the face. Plenty of movies have a gay man who meets a straight woman equipped with a "magic" vagina that he can't resist. It seems to be a film staple that gay men just haven't met the right woman. However, transcending that idiocy, this film ends by giving Odete an ethereal penis with which she expands her madness to include Rui. After this nugget of manure, I just cannot take anymore "straight women with gay men" lunacy. Really, it's enough.

The thrust of this story is so odd as to stretch credibility almost to the point of crumbling, but Rodrigues just about managed to keep me on board, with a clear, almost ritual, exposition of the two characters' stories, before they start to entwine in a bizarre cocktail of obsession and distress. The overall feel is that of Greek tragedy, an excruciating inevitability that helps to accept, unlikely as it may seem, the final scene where the male lead is sodomised by the female, while the ghost of his now-dead boyfriend looks on (I kid you not).A brief outline of the plot will give you an idea of just how strange this film is: Rui and Pedro have been in love for a year - they've just exchanged rings and the future is full of plans, but then Pedro is killed in a car crash. In another part of Lisbon, Odete works in the local supermarket and is going out with Alberto, one of the security guards. She starts to get broody to the point of obsession and, when Alberto refuses to have a child with her, she throws him out. Up to now, were still in a normal film, but Odete gatecrashes Pedro's funeral and the weirdness begins. She steals Pedro's ring (by sucking it off his finger, in a scene not devoid of necrophiliac undertones - at this point any doubts about her instability are completely dispelled), claims she's carrying Pedro's child and begins to insinuate herself into Rui's life by implying an almost supernatural connection with Pedro. When the pregnancy turns out to be phantom - or faked, we're never really sure and in any case, no-one in the film really takes it seriously - she persues her obsession by subsuming Pedro's personality and manipulating Rui into an acceptance of her as a substitute for his dead lover.While the film may appear some kind of freudian horror story, the core remains very human: Odete is as lost as Rui and never really convincing as the reincarnation of Pedro. Her gauche efforts in this respect tend to alleviate the creeping sense of evil that permeates her manipulation of Rui, who can only accept such a sham because of his overriding need to sublimate Pedro's death.Rodrigues leaves much open to interpretation: just how conscious is Odete of what she is doing to Rui? just how far is Rui taken in by her? His refusal to comment leads me to think he's suggesting it doesn't really matter: here we have two people taking the same road to meet two different needs, which can be said of a great many love stories.The film is sound enough in its technical aspects (acting, photography, etc.) to carry the story, so I'd recommend a look if you get the chance.

It had an original script and for a Portuguese film it is pretty good!And love the soundtrack ! The actors were really good and the ghost of "Pedro", even if it wasn't explicitly on the screen, the director made it that the audience could feel it! It was a surprising and shocking movie, but really well done!And the end is definitely a big shock and surprise!Of all the characters, "Rui" played by the actor Nuno Gil, was excellent and the most touchable to the audience, and remarkably the one we had more feelings about!Ana Cristina Oliveira was good as "Odete", but when she reincarnates in "Pedro", when she dress the jeans we have that "dejá vu" on the Levis' store publicity clip she had made!