User reviews

What no one seems to find in the film is the gradual regression of the hero to a canine level. We begin with his attachment to his dog as the only keen affection in his life -- they kiss, fondle, etc. Like the dog, Sergio tends to judge and eventually express his erotic energy through smell (e.g. the scene where he licks the shower wall), and at the end he is wandering the heaps of refuse poking and smelling at random, as the dog does.

His sexual hunger is probably to be passively possessed, but his culture and friends may demand a more active role. Yet he never finds satisfaction in such a role -- he rebuffs the fellow who's going down on him in the toilet -- and one imagines that what he really wants from the hunky motorcycle driver is to be assaulted and possessed by him. His loneliness and social anomie, as well as his undefined erotic drives, send him down a spiral of dehumanizing impulses until he seems to have forsaken any recognizably human responses.

It's an interesting and original film fantasy (I agree with the comment that "eye candy", perhaps the editor's addition,indicates a pornographic intent) but too simply developed to challenge your imagination.

What begins as a story of a homosexual young scavenger in the streets of Lisbon ends like an almost surreal wandering of a cartoon character amid images of litter and desolate sceneries. The sequences of the first half of the movie seem to show the young man's lonely course, obsessed by the love of men's bodies and motorbikes and feeling equally excited when he caresses any of them. His only friend is the dog which goes everywhere with him. This first half although made of a lot of fragmentary scenes some of them very crude and hard core, has some meaning by showing in acceptable realistic terms the young man's obsessive course. But in my opinion the final scenes twist that meaning and change something psychologically real and authentic into some rare pathologic anomaly of the mind which devalues the whole story a lot. The movie has however some value because of the convincing visual harshness of scenes in its first half, combining in a somewhat symbolic way the real garbage the scavengers have to collect with the filthy obsessions in the main character's mind in a series of simultaneously uncommon and sordid but real scenes.

O FANTASMA is not a movie for the casual audience. This dark and seamy vision of sexual confusion is almost unremittingly harrowing, but director Joao Pedro Rodriques drives his vision of a young lad (who lives on the periphery of society and longs to be wanted and loved, even in the 'forbidden world' of same sex attraction) from reality to surreality.

Metaphors abound: the hero works in garbage disposal on the night shift - a stance that sums up his world's view of his persona. Apparently the actor Ricardo Meneses was selected for the lead simply on the basis of his presence and his animal appeal.

This is a rich performance of a boy with an approach/avoidance to his sexuality and Meneses is unafraid to bear it all in his portrayal of passion on the edge. The drive for sexual gratification is dark, sensuous, and bordering on dangerous. His eventual transformation as a 'comic book-like' predator seems natural in the way both director and actor drive this story to its inevitable ending.

The film is VERY dark photographically and while this technique matches the message (this is a story about life in the night), it is difficult at times to visualize the action. The noisy musical scoring becomes almost unbearable at times. But despite these reservations O FANTASMA suggests the debut of a remarkable directorial talent and certainly gives heed to a major screen presence in Ricardo Meneses! Not for everyone, but for those with an eye for something original then try this little film. In Portuguese with subtitles

This movie is like "Eyes Wide Shut" in its subject matter -- a trip through a sexually charged, night-time, urban landscape. The film is intense and beautiful and hot for its first sixty minutes. It weakens quite a bit after that, probably because like Lynch in "Lost Highway", Rodrigues just isn't sure where the film should go after reaching its climax. Consequently the last half hour is slow and strange and sometimes laughable but overall it is definitely a film worth seeing.

An almost fly-on-the-wall look into the life of a young gay garbage collector in Lisbon. Sergio, (Ricardo Meneses), seems comfortable with his sexuality; he likes to cruise and he's certainly getting enough casual sex, (explicitly shown), but his fetishes and his infatuation with a young rich boy would indicate he's not entirely happy. Joao Pedro Rodrigues' first film, "O Fantasma" doesn't offer much in the way of plot and you can't say Sergio's life is particularly interesting but Meneses plays him with an unabashed physicality that at times seems to go beyond mere acting. It's not a particularly pleasant picture but while it deals with 'sensationalist' material, it feels honest, at times even dull and never exploitative and as an addition to New Queer Cinema, it's certainly different.

This riddle of a film is directed by a man who narrates the DVD with a commentary that makes about as much sense as the film. When you finish hearing it, you will have no more understanding of the story or characters than you did before--except for one thing. You will learn that he harbored sexual fantasies about young garbage collectors that he viewed as they went about their tasks outside his window. Thus, he made up a scenario about such fantasies.

The faults are extensive, beginning with the disjointed screenplay which sheds no light at all on any of the authority figures surrounding the young protagonist or why they are all forcing him to submit to sexual humiliation. His obsessive desire for the man of his dreams is based on one chance meeting and thereafter he stalks the man until he finally "catches" him--by tying him up in tape and handcuffing him, then depositing him in a dark alley behind his house where he leaves him to wander off to a place that holds endless fascination for the director--a garbage dump.

The sexual scenes are not even sensual, let alone truly erotic, and most of them take place in the dark, with some of them simulated and not graphic at all. The actors are all unknowns with no previous experience and go through their paces with a modicum of credibility.

It's as though the director tried to say something important without saying anything at all except to give us visual images of a deserted landscape, a handsome boy and his quest for some sort of sexual bonding with another man. But a story about dark obsession needs a script, needs characters, needs a beginning, middle and end and this has no structure at all. Fittingly, it all ends in a garbage dump.

It's a riddle that not even the Director's Commentary clears up. He himself seems to make no sense of most of the proceedings, so why should we? It's pretentious, at best, and hardly more than a cheap exploitation film.

Astonishingly, it has won a few awards at film festivals which can only make you wonder what they were thinking.

`O Fantasma' is definitely a disturbing movie. After seeing it, surely you will leave the movie theater thoughtful, impressed and full of pessimism. A movie that makes you think about loneliness in the big urban areas. A story that may be happening outside your house, while you live a comfortable life inside. It is a lonely world that belongs to the night, to the shadows, making part of the underground of the big cities. Once belonging to this world, it seems that its habitants are deteriorated into indigent human beings, who lose their names, homes and origins.

The movie tells the story of Sergio who works at night as a garbage collector on a big city. He lives alone with his dog - and that introduces you into a universe where man and animal live under merged boundary conditions. Sergio is a lonely guy. Homosexual, he keeps himself away from a female job colleague who is always flirting with him. He has no lover, family or friends. But he seems to be always in the company of an enormous desire, which will conflict with his own loneliness.

Loneliness and desire summarise Sergio's reality and push him into a primitive world, where man becomes animal. The protagonist tries to consume his strong sexual desire through anonymous, casual and wild sex. Thus, it is on the dark corners, public toilets and other filthy places where Sergio tries to satisfy his sexual impulse. But the promiscuity of those moments does not appear to satisfy him, since his desire leads him to the figure of an attractive swimmer guy. A guy who lives in one of the districts that Sergio runs into his night shifts, during his journey of work and garbage. That hard and solitary reality makes desire becomes obsession. Apparently, a single motivation only exists: search the young guy, peeping, observing him from distance and getting touch with an opposite environment.

But Sergio seems to be conducted to an unavoidable end: a curious reversal process of the Human evolution. From human being, he seems to revert through a trail that takes him to some animal condition. As if loneliness and desire would lead to the most primitive stage of mankind. The anti-evolution process transforms him in an irrational creature: he eats, drinks, urinates and evacuates as an animal. It is when Sergio abandons his man's part and, protected by black latex clothes, ruptures with the present and starts roaming on an urban world like an animal guided by his instincts only.

A frightening scenario, result from a contemporaneous reality - at same time empty, isolated and cruel. And that victimized Sergio.

This film was crude and extremely baffling. There was very limited structure that lead to confusion throughout. Poor levels of performance and inadequate dialog made this movie both disappointing and empty, leaving me unfulfilled to say the least. The characters quite simply had "no character". At the end of this movie I was left perplexed and very confused. The closing scene left me wondering what has just happened and why, how it links to the beginning and other scenes of the movie and has no closure or link for a sequel. I would probably have to watch this movie three times to grasp it, which I will not be doing as I will probably fall asleep if I try and watch it again.

I've seen this film twice--once at the cinema and about a year later, on DVD. I too wondered if something had been cut from the film--there is an abrupt transition about three-quarters of the way through that is jarring. As a psychologist, I see this as a work of art that functions, like a dream, to take the viewer into the inner self of the protagonist as well into one's own inner self. While a dream can change scenes abruptly and without logical transitions, the logical mind is still at work as we watch a film, and an illogical or unexplained transtion can actually be distracting, as I found it to be in this film. One further question--or criticism about the editing or story line--the film opens with its climactic scene at the very beginning, involving Sergio, the protagonist, and the object of his obsessive desire. It is extremely erotic and disturbing and putting it right at the beginning--it is never returned to--leaves one with a sense of incompleteness at the end of the film. That said, I found the film to be extraordinarily truthful psychologically, just as our deepest fantasies are truthful--its explicitness was entirely appropriate and not pornographic. The essence of pornography is denial of feeling, but the film is saturated with feeling. The extraordinary beauty of the lead actor will evoke in the viewer either empathy or desire or both--and one admires his willingness to play his role with all stops out and with utter dedication.

Definitely worth seeing.

Strange movie that deals with the sexual secrets/fetishes of a young man, most of which are deviant. The movie basically follows the day-to-day sexual encounters of a man who by day is a garbage collector but at night becomes a sexual deviant. Along the way, he receives a graphic blow job in a bathroom from another young man (I saw an interview with the movie's director who described the efforts to get the actor, who is straight in real life, hard for the oral sex scene), has sex with what appears to be a policeman, frolics nude in a pool after hours, has a strange sex scene that involves a faucet/hose in a shower and a leather-type sex scene. Though filled with sex, the actor manages to form a likable, in-depth character that is trapped by his sexual identity that in many ways can be easy to relate to for many. If you watch this, be prepared for graphic sex and a strange story.

Well, it is hard to describe this movie. It shocked the Venice Festival and right doing so! We are asked by this film where the boundaries of the male sexuality are. Can we live without love? not even dogs do it! Please be aware of the explicit sex and the bondage scenes! hey, enjoy it at least as much as I did!

This is a somewhat interesting idea - if it really went anywhere. I enjoyed the first act as the young man becomes obsessed and I hoped the film would go further and to more mature places. The film just feels like a very long excuse to watch the gorgeous young man who plays the lead with no clothes on - and he's nude constantly for those who are interested in that.There's nothing wrong with making a hot film but honestly, this goes nowhere and manages only to raise a few interesting questions and then do zero with them.

I can't help but feel it's a protracted excuse to see this 18 year old beauty in his all his narcissistic glory. The filmmakers seem confused in their own descriptions of the action on the commentary track and seem to think that "Shocking Images" equals a strong film. Nah, not by a long shot. It's hardly the hard-hitting exploration of intense obsession it tries to be and succeeds only in being a pictorial of a this guy.

One need only to see the "special features menu" where it lists "eye candy" and each scene of the young man in his glory is featured for added pleasure. Come on now gentlemen... who are the filmmakers and anyone who seriously watched this film kidding? I'm all for a serious, dark explorations of taboo but this is not it.

I'm still only vaguely aware of the point of this movie. The actors are all borderline mutes, and it just drags on endlessly with little to no plot. If the film were shorter, it might have been tolerable, but since it weighs in at an hour and a half, I found my mind wandering more often than not. I don't imagine this is the worst movie ever, but it's certainly the worst movie I have ever seen.

Some people have said this is just porn disguised as art, which is a suggestion that confuses me. There is one blowjob scene and a lot of nudity, but beyond that, there's nothing here that you wouldn't see in your average R-rated film. There are no explicit sex scenes, and even if there were, you could get a decent porn flick for less money that focused more on them and less on people wandering around aimlessly with no direction. What little sex there is usually gets abruptly ended before it's over, half the time before it even starts.

Perhaps the one saving grace that may justify renting this is the main actor, who is very sexy. Of course, finding someone sexier in a movie that's actually worth watching would not be hard, but if you absolutely must see more of the guy on the cover of this DVD, I could see using that excuse to pick it up. Just be prepared to use your remote a lot… or simply go to the special features and watch the eye candy section rather than the movie itself.

There is a missing piece of continuity, which the director's commentary ignores by claiming that the last third of the film is fantasy. It would be a spoiler to say what it is, but I found the transition dishonest. Worse, one learns from the commentary that every young male auditioning for the lead part had to do the solo masturbatory shower scene; hundreds did so until finding Ricardo, who was perfect. I am sure there was much enjoyment for the director to watch the auditions, but the horror comes at the sexual exploitation of Ricardo, made clear in the commentary. The director declined to use the actor again, because his body was "used up", leaving Ricardo to move back to live and farm with his mother. The director treats Ricardo as his character Sergio treats his sexual objects, controlling, and then abandoning them. I grieve for Ricardo.

This movie has absolutely zero redeeming qualities, and was a total waste of time. We watched it to the bitter end, hoping that it would get better, or at least interesting, but that never happened.

The protagonist is not necessarily likeable, but the film maker ensures he is compelling, both physically in the way he moves and reacts, and emotionally as he responds to people and, especially, things. It is shot mostly at night, wonderfully catching the colours in what we usually think of as black. Not many films keep coming back to the mind as this one does, just for its beauty, and the success with which it shows how an obsession can consume a person.

Unlike the other reviewer of this movie, I thought it was a stunner. Yes, it's odd, and yes, it's shot in a lot of darkness, but I think it works. It's like a parable -- simplified, cut to the bone. We know little about the protagonist, or why he does why he does; we're just told the story, in all its bizarrerie. He seems more like a dog than a human (as his growling etc shows), but there's no pop-psychology here, no explanations, just the story of his movement into ever darker depths of bestial behaviour. It's not light, but it is extremely sexy -- the scene where he puts on a pair of old motorcycle gloves, salvaged from the garbage he collects by day, and starts to caress himself sends a shiver down the spine. Other scenes are more brutally direct, but the movie's lack of coyness makes it as refreshing as it is disquieting. I found it riveting.