Interesteg What makes it different from others?

ThiefHott Too much of everything

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Sienna-Rose Mclaughlin The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Martin Bradley 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.

bjk1961 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.

jim smith Joao Rodrigues' latest appears to have a bigger budget than "O Fantasma." The photography is better, the color is more eye-catching. And he certainly does know how to pick mouthwateringly sexy guys for his casts. But just as he was mesmerized by garbage in "O Fantasma", he's morosely taken up in "Odete" by a wake and the necrophiliac attentions to a young man's embalmed corpse by the poor fellow's "crazy lady" neighbor and by his boyfriend, both of whom later become nauseatingly attached to the young man's gravesite. The finale is reminiscent of the climax of "The Grifters" but that scene made sense. The last minutes of "Odete" are grotesque and poor in credibility.Certainly, this movie is original and Rodrigues is a very talented auteur. But to succeed as art, a painful piece like "Odete" needs to be more than intensely depressing. Jim Smith

tnwestlake 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.