O FANTASMA
Arty gay film.
In Portuguese with English subtitles. Running time: 90 minutes. Not rated (full frontal nudity, sex scenes, language). At the Quad, 13th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
PORTUGUESE director Joao Pedro Rodrigues uses sparse dialogue and atmospheric cinematography to track a young man’s lust-fueled descent into depravity in the trance-like art film “O Fantasma.”
The extremely tactile Sergio (non-professional actor Ricardo Meneses) lives in Lisbon, shuttling between his cheap flea-pit accommodations and a job as a garbage collector, accompanied all the while by the junkyard dog he’s befriended.
He fends off the advances of a female co-worker (Beatriz Torcato) in favor of a string of anonymous sexual encounters with men, until he fixates on the “phantom” of the title, a motorbike-riding stranger.
Sergio’s obsession leads to increasingly bizarre stalking behavior, and once he dons a black bondage suit, the film falls down the rabbit-hole into a surrealist fantasy.
The extended canine metaphor wears thin very quickly – Sergio seems to spend his life in a frenzy of sniffing and licking and abject groveling – and his character is sketched too thinly to resonate, but the sexually explicit “O Fantasma” is nevertheless an interesting addition to a genre that tends too often to disregard artistic technique.