Two Drifters
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Features
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• DVD-Video
• NTSC
• Subtitled
• Widescreen
In Theaters : 2005
DVD Release : 17 October, 2006 |
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Two Drifters Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Not So O Fantastic
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The story of the girl who dumps the guy for not hunkering down is as old as the sun, but the way in which this girl, Odete (Ana Cristina de Oliveira), fills the void is strange and fresh. She is a supermarket rollergirl (does this job actually exist in Portugal?) who wants more from life, a better career, a wedding, and most importantly a baby. He's not interested so they split. From there Odete shows up at a funeral parlor with nothing but nefarious things on her mind and leaves deeply in love with the dearly departed Pedro. Soon after she begins to experience symptoms of pregnancy; morning sickness, enlarged belly, etc., and she is convinced that Pedro impregnated her from the grave. The pregnancy test says she isn't pregnant at all, but who has time for such small details? The other titular drifter, Rui, is not as much a focus of the film (The original Portuguese title is "Odete"). He truly was Pedro's lover as we see in the very first scene, before we know anything about these characters we know Rui and Pedro are in love. Those pronouncements of love, however, are followed by the deadly car wreck that sets the rest of the film in motion.
This film was a fairly ugly miss in my book. The plot doesn't make a whole lot of sense (although it doesn't feel like a puzzler) and the characters are horrible people and horribly sick. I'm sure director Joao Pedro Rodrigues was going for a meditation on loss but he actually came up with a nonsensical mind bender with some gay porn thrown in for whoever might be interested. She goes shopping and he goes cruising and I'm sure it is all very therapeutic for these characters but I'm just not sure what I'm supposed to get out of it. There is a lot of Christian symbolism hanging about, from crosses to immaculate conceptions to bloody palms but to what end? I obviously don't want everything spelled out for me, but whatever message was trying to be sent did not arrive here.
This is not to say that all is lost either. The opaque nature of the film is a positive in a lot of ways. If a character makes a face or a gesture it isn't dwelled upon or underlined, even if they aren't sitting in the center of the shot. Music doesn't just arrive to prod your emotions along either. Rodrigues has an eye for catching attention grabbing shots and the patience to hold them for longer than 3 seconds. There is also a strong performance by Oliveira as Odete. Her character is mostly a tragic one, but at times the pathetic nature of her is so overwhelming that the performance slides over into the comic territory. This is a woman, after all, who rejected her very real boyfriend and replaced him with an imaginary baby conceived by a man who she has never met and is now dead. That is her prerogative I suppose, but you will agree that it is a little strange. So while there are ideas here I just wish they would have been made a little louder and a little clearer. ** |
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Two Drifters dvd movie.