{"id":6896,"date":"2012-08-06T08:01:48","date_gmt":"2012-08-06T06:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olivierpere.wordpress.com\/?p=6896"},"modified":"2015-08-09T19:13:04","modified_gmt":"2015-08-09T18:13:04","slug":"locarno-2012-day-6-joao-pedro-rodrigues-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arte.tv\/sites\/olivierpere\/2012\/08\/06\/locarno-2012-day-6-joao-pedro-rodrigues-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Locarno 2012 Day 6: Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Joao<\/a>

Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues and Jo\u00e3o Rui Guerra da Mata, in Locarno<\/p><\/div>\n

Lire en fran\u00e7ais<\/a><\/p>\n

Portugal is a country that produces films, but, uniquely, films made only by artists. It has its great masters, its \u201cpo\u00e8tes maudits\u201d, but also its young and incredibly gifted vanguard, represented by Miguel Gomes (who, with Tabu<\/em> has just made the finest film of 2012, alongside Holy Motors<\/em> by Leos Carax), Jo\u00e3o Nicolau and certain others. From the same generation \u2013 or almost \u2013 filmmaker Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues stands out as something of a maverick.<\/p>\n

\"O<\/a>

O fantasma<\/p><\/div>\n

His films quickly established a highly personal homoerotic universe, governed by phantoms and phantasms, as indicated by the title of his first feature film O fantasma<\/em>. Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues was born in Lisbon in 1966. He initially studied biology and wanted to be an ornithologist before he became interested in film, working as an assistant director and assistant editor on several productions. His first feature, O fantasma <\/em>(2000), screened in the official selection at Venice, caused an international critical sensation, and became a rallying call for a particular cin\u00e9phile community, both gay and straight, ever alert to radical and uncompromising cinematic surprises. The story, pitched between the sordid and the sublime, about a gay young garbage collector falling madly in love with a stranger, combines lyrical low-life and a raw depiction of sexuality with an exploration of man as animal regressing to his primitive instincts.<\/p>\n

\"Odete\"<\/a>

Odete<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Mourir<\/a>

Mourir comme un homme<\/p><\/div>\n

Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues\u2019 second film, Odete\/Two Drifters <\/em>(2005), again explores amour fou, obsession and transgression. This time, a gorgeous young woman with a sensual and vaguely androgynous body brings a new otherness to Rodrigues\u2019s gay cinema. This intrusion of the feminine into a virile world is in fact the subject of Odete<\/em>, which illustrates the circulation of desire between life and death, but also between the sexes, and subsequent confusion of sexual identity. Rodrigues was to continue in this direction in his third film, the splendid and gloomy To Die Like a Man<\/em> (Morrer como um homem, <\/em>2009), about the death throes of a transsexual unhappy in love and in his sense of self, who lives as a woman but wants to die as a man. Rodrigues\u2019 cinema is transgenre\/transgendered, in all senses of the words. In both sexual and cinematic terms. Indeed, the filmmaker draws on a heterogeneous range of references. He continually shifts between an almost Bressonian rigour (using models more than actors) and the flamboyant lyricism of Douglas Sirk\u2019s melodramas, the sober fantasy of Jacques Tourneur and the dreamlike, operatic baroque of Werner Schroeter\u2019s films. One could also view Odete <\/em>as a religious film in whichGod is replaced by amour fou, indeed as a surrealist film without the idea of blasphemy. Odete <\/em>is in effect a story about a slow progression towards the absolute.<\/p>\n

Odete<\/em> is part of a particular tradition of fantasy-melodrama in which love triumphs over death, lovers love beyond the grave, beyond the borders of dream and reality, life and death. One cannot help but think of The Ghost and Mrs Muir<\/em>, Peter Ibbetson, Portrait of Jennie<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The shadow of Vertigo<\/em> is also felt hovering throughout Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues\u2019 film, which is suffused with an atmosphere of morbid fetishism. The film might well be entitled \u201cd\u2019entre les morts\u201d, as was the French novel by Boileau and Narcejac that inspired the Hitchcock masterpiece.<\/p>\n

If Odete\u00a0 – the character \u2013 is haunted by Pedro, Odete<\/em> \u2013 the film \u2013 is haunted by Hollywood films. \u201cMoon River\u201d, the young lovers\u2019 favourite song, was originally sung by Audrey Hepburn in Blake Edwards\u2019 Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/em>, and appears in several versions on the very carefully constructed musical soundtrack designed by French director Frank Beauvais. Rodrigues is not the first to test the aesthetic conventions of 50s and 60s Hollywood movies against the disenchantments of contemporary reality. Before him, Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a number of audacious critical transpositions of Douglas Sirk melodramas in the \u201cpale\u201d Germany of the 1970s. In Odete <\/em>\u00a0Rodrigues takes his desire for cinema to the limits, as if osmosing his heroine\u2019s phantom pregnancy. This desire expresses itself in the delirium of the story, in its convocation of fantasy, enchantment, and the natural elements rather than psychology and psychoanalysis: as in the scene where a nocturnal breeze lifts the curtains in Odete\u2019s basement apartment and penetrates her with Pedro\u2019s spirit, like a divine visitation. For one sublime shot (followed by another, equally remarkable, of a bouquet of blood red flowers), realism slips into another parallel dimension, Portugal ceases to be the locus of the film as we enter an enchanted world that is \u201cbigger than life\u201d and that is found only in the films of Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues.
\nThere is an Asian vein in Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues\u2019 cinema.<\/p>\n

\"La<\/a>

La dernie\u0300re fois que j’ai vu Macao, l’un des 19 films du Concorso internazionale de Locarno<\/p><\/div>\n

This began with China, China<\/em> (2007), a wonderful short about the Chinese community in Lisbon (as with Odete<\/em>, shown in the Directors\u2019 Fortnight when I was running it). Then there is the impressive Alvorada Vermelha<\/em> (Red Dawn<\/em>) a harsh and lyrical documentary shot in Macao\u2019s fish market\u00a0 in 2011, and screened at the Festival last year. Both two shorts were co-written and co-directed with Rodrigues\u2019 partner Jo\u00e3o Rui Guerra da Mata. The latter has worked, right from the start, on the scripts and art direction of the films. Together they made A \u00daltima Vez Que Vi Macau<\/em> (The Last Time I Saw Macao<\/em>) shown today as a world premi\u00e8re and in the international competition at Locarno. The film continues this intimate and lyrical exploration of the Chinese city where Jo\u00e3o Rui Guerra da Mata spent part of his childhood and youth.
\nThis film achieves a bold combination of genres: documentary essay, diary, police procedural and fantasy film. The beautifully filmed shots that capture the chaotic beauty of the nocturnal cityscapes are accompanied by a voice-over narration, recounting a strange journey and a return home.\u00a0 The narrator is in fact returning to his childhood town, some 30 years after leaving, in response to a call for help from a female friend, Candy, a cabaret singer. What follows is a game of cat and mouse between the narrator and Candy who keeps leaving him enigmatic messages but seems to be avoiding an impossible reunion. Rodrigues\u2019 cinema has always been an art of metamorphosis, confusion (sexual, but not only sexual) and communication between separate realms: the human and animal kingdom, past and present, love and death, man and woman, Hollywood and the poetry of European cinema. From beautiful footage of urban Macao the co-auteurs manage to create a fantastical atmosphere of conspiracy and apocalypse, pitched something between Aldrich\u2019s Kiss Me Deadly<\/em> and Tourneur\u2019s Cat People<\/em>. The strangeness and anxiety emanate from everyday details, from a particular framing or a particular sound.\u00a0 Baroque art is an art of metamorphosis. Without revealing any of the mysteries and surprises of this splendid essay, almost devoid of any human figures, but inhabited by the voices of its two auteurs, we could describe A \u00daltima Vez Que Vi Macau <\/em>as a totally baroque film, since it never stops mutating and changing form, under our very eyes, moving within the same shot from filmed personal diary to delirious crime fiction. It should also be noted that Jo\u00e3o Rui Guerra da Mata has the distinction of being the only filmmaker this year to have two films in two different competitions at Locarno since he is the director, this time solo, of O que arde cura,<\/em> screening as an international premi\u00e8re in the Pardo di domani section. It is a wonderful 27 minute short, loosely based on Jean Cocteau\u2019s \u201cLa Voix humaine\u201d, set on the night of the great fire of Lisbon, and the lead and only role is played by\u2026one Jo\u00e3o Pedro Rodrigues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lire en fran\u00e7ais Portugal is a country that produces films, but, uniquely, films made only by artists. 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