CHRISTIAN IMAGERY

The great “trilogy of flesh” by João Pedro Rodrigues is composed of O Fantasma (Phantom, 2000), Odete (Two Drifters, 2005), and Morrer Como um Homem (To Die Like a Man, 2009). These three feature films seek the dividing line that separates the great vital power from our animal-becoming, our imperceptible-becoming, our transgender-becoming, and from the deadly logic that presides over definitive transformations. The characters in these films are caught between a vital energy and a death drive, between the creative power of the invention of their body and the schizophrenic danger of having really become someone other than themselves.

This dividing line meets another one. There are always at least two movies coexisting within each of the first three feature films by the Lisbon filmmaker. On the one hand, there is a Christian drama of the flesh that is without solution when it is faced with the incommensurability of its desire. This is the drama of a soul that is too incarnated for its quest for the absolute, crushed by the absence of a horizon between a sky filled with heavy clouds and a land covered with the thick mud of the world. At the same time, the influences of the rigidity of Dreyer and Bresson, and of Baroque religious painting, are palpable. On the other hand, however, this great Christian drama of a European auteur is always diminished by the intrusion of imagery that is foreign to the solemnity of this film genre. Rodrigues describes the romantic destiny of a Deleuzean devenir-mineur to which he gives all his belief until his film becomes as minor as his character. The singularity of his cinematographic gesture is to link the physical transformation of the main character to the mutation of the films, which come to be contaminated by minor genres such as pornographic film, fantasy film, melodrama, B or Z-series, S&M, the Gothic, and popular religious imagery.

This ambivalence in terms of genre culminates in To Die Like a Man, where the mutant body of Tónia causes the mutation of the psychological drama into a fairy tale. This happens during a picaresque and burlesque episode in a chimerical forest where a giant moon suddenly turns the night a purple color.