Two Drifters begins with a long, wet kiss. Two young men, Pedro (Joao Carreira) and Alberto (Carloto Cotta), are celebrating their first year together. Pedro, a student, is reluctant to trade the fleshy specificity of Alberto's torso for those books. Alberto insists he go home. This is a mistake. Many more will follow in this gorgeously lensed but grotesquely self-indulgent ode to unhealthy desire by the Portuguese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues (O Fantasma ), co-written with Paulo Rebelo.
Pedro drives off into the night. Alberto prolongs the moment via cell phone, only to hear his boyfriend's car crash in stereo a few blocks away. Reaching the wreck, Alberto beholds Pedro impaled and lovely, a human hood ornament.
Two Drifters' Portuguese title is more accurate, Odete. Odete (Ana Cristina De Oliveira) is a roller-skating price-checker at one of those enormous indoor malls. Responding to a pregnant female customer, Odete asks to feel the woman's belly. This, too, is a mistake. At home in her brightly colored but cubicle-size apartment, Odete begs her hunky fellow-employee boyfriend to help her make a baby. He refuses. She freaks. He leaves. She breaks her cell phone. These are not deep waters, but treacherous nonetheless.
The circle of depravity is completed when Odete turns up uninvited to Pedro's wake. Lifting the cloth off the dead boy's face, Odete plays it straight until she witnesses Alberto kiss the corpse. Odete then kneels over the casket and tries to remove a ring from the dead man's finger. Her mouth proves the only useful tool for the job. The ring is inscribed "Two Drifters." It was Pedro and Alberto's relationship marker.
Odete loses it big time at the gravesite, jumping on the closed casket just after it's lowered into the ground. Pulled out and expelled from the cemetery by Alberto, she is now certifiably mad. For its devotees, the real mission of Two Drifters commences. Hysterical pregnancy, obsessive love, and necrophilia drive the balance of the tale as Odete and Alberto unconvincingly find in each other what life has deprived them of.
Carloto Cotta as Alberto is competent enough as a screen lover, but lacks any special power to seduce us for a no-holds-barred bout of cinema lunacy. Ana Cristina De Oliveira gives Odete a self-delusional certitude. Two Drifters merely meanders, with its characters rejecting all good advice as they head for a gender-defying zone of cosmic love.
Rodriques has a nice feel for the corrupting influence of pop music: stray, sometimes barely heard tunes fill the air from car radios, or over stores' music systems. Henry Mancini's "Moon River" (source of the Two Drifters imagery) is first heard in a tacky disco version as Pedro prepares to drive off.
In the cemetery as Odete is losing it by Pedro's tombstone, complete with boy-band-like picture under glass, Pedro's mom looks at her as simple folk have always beheld the devil. Mom recites The Lord's Prayer, and for a moment I recall why I once did.