Knight at the Movies: Two Drifters and Lady in the Water - 4254 - Gay Lesbian Bi Trans News

A passionate, "must see" indie and a cloying fantasy -- guess which one I fell for? We begin with a kiss. A very passionate kiss shot in close-up between a man – and as the camera pulls back to reveal – another man. Dark haired, 21 year-old Pedro (João Carreira) doesn't want to say goodnight to his blond boyfriend, Rui (Nuno Gil) – especially after Rui has given him a silver ring to match his own with the inscription 'two drifters' engraved inside. Reluctantly Pedro gets into his car after declaring his love and drives away after another passionate kiss. A moment later, Rui dashes back outside his apartment and down the street at the sound of a car crash. With a certain dread, he knows it's his Beloved. Sure enough, Pedro has crashed through the windshield and dies in Rui's arms. Thus begins the first five minutes of writer-director João Pedro Rodrigues' new movie, Two Drifters. This quick one two punch of passion and tragedy is very much in the tradition of Almodóvar but after this unconscious nod to the master, Rodrigues' boldly heads off on his own. He takes his movie and his characters into increasingly deeper waters. This audacious, sexy movie pushes the melodramatic envelope to the limit – then punches through to the other side for its daring climax and I dug it. Big Time. The movie plays an exclusive one week run at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema. Don't miss it. The plot of the film, set in Portugal, comes into focus at the wake for Pedro. It is there that the obsession with the dead man by the tall, oddly beautiful Odete (Ana Cristina De Oliveira) becomes palpable. We have first encountered Odete skating through a large supermarket and becoming enthralled with a pregnant customer. Odette wants to get pregnant too but when she mentions this and her desire to marry to her boyfriend Alberto (Carloto Cotta), a security guard at the supermarket, he scorns her yearnings. She flies into a rage and tosses the (spectacularly) nude Alberto out of the apartment. The scene at the wake follows. Odete, for reasons that are never made clear, is suddenly infatuated with the late Pedro who lived down the hall in her apartment building with his mother. In the first of many audacious acts she literally sucks the dead man's 'two drifters' engraved ring off his finger. Odete's hysterical grief (talk about your drama queens!) over the late Pedro escalates into crazier and crazier acts (at one point she takes up residence at his graveside) until nothing – even the return of the boyfriend – can stop her obsession. Odete's behavior has the wild eyed intensity of Isabelle Adjani in The Story of Adele H along with the calculated determination of Reese Witherspoon in Election. Nothing's going to stop Odete from stalking Pedro – not even the fact that he's dead. Eventually, even that won't suffice for the determined Odete who might be mad – or prescient. At the same time Rui is sliding into suicidal depression as he deals with the loss of his lover (through anonymous sex, a suicide attempt, and watching Breakfast at Tiffany's and listening to 'Moon River' – which has the Johnny Mercer lyric that provides the title of the movie). Finally, Rui and Odete, who have been jousting over Pedro's memory, form an eye opening bond (to say the least) that allows them to share the dead man once and for all. Their solution, the final scene of the movie, is Rodrigues' biggest gamble and I found it enthralling. The movie has the passionate, excessive bite of Sante Sangre, the appalling glee of Cemetery Man and the mixture of sex and death prominent in The 4th Man and the whole thing is just this side of camp. Now that's tantalizing. In Portuguese. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Speaking of tantalizing mysteries, M. Night Shyamalan is back with another movie. Like The Village, Lady in the Water, from the look of the coming attractions, had the promise of a terrific ghost story for adults. The kind without the gratuitous gore of Saw II and Hostel, the cynical brutality of David Fincher and his ilk or the silliness of the American remakes of the new Japanese creepers – The Grudge, The Ring II and the like. Shyamalan's movies are worth hoping for because he's pulled off the difficult feat of the adult ghost story in the past (Signs, The Six Sense). But the new picture, gussied up with gorgeous cinematography, wonderful acting from his eager cast (headed by Paul Giamatti), another beautiful James Newton Howard score, and moments of eerie beauty, dries up as surely as The Village did. Shyamalan dispenses with his patented surprise twist but he also fails to provide a compelling narrative. The simplistic story – complete with its own myth-like prologue – focuses on a water creature (don't ask) (Bryce Dallas Howard) who surfaces in the swimming pool of an apartment complex filled with stock, eccentric characters. These are linked by Paul Giamatti as the maintenance man with a troubled past who must convince the residents to help him return the water babe to The Blue World before a killer wolf-like creature gets her and killer monkeys hiding in the trees get it. So yeah – you either go with this fairy tale for grownups all the way or not at all. I didn't.

THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985