User Reviews

A mess of misused metaphors and confused imagery from start to finish, I was left scratching my head wondering who these people are and why they behave the way they do. Forgive me for expecting the film to provide any answers. The good news: if you like beautiful boys, Ricardo Meneses as Sergio is one of the most gorgeous creatures to ever stand before a lens. Despite the hopelessly confusing script, his acting (such as it is) is amazing, especially at his age (18) and experience (first film). Too bad he had to be "discovered" by a director who makes his audience beg for each scrap of insight, and pretentiously expects the viewer to read their own interpretation into whatever nonsense he sets up as his next scene. I wanted to give it the benefit of a doubt, so after sitting through one screening of this erotically charged but confused movie, I sat through it again with the director's commentary on. Cheating, I know, but after paying all that money for the DVD I was hoping to gain some idea of what was going on. After the second screening I was half in love with the young lead actor, but the commentary destroyed any respect I may have had for the director.

Sergio is a garbage collector in Lisbon. He works a graveyard shift with an assortment of oddballs, and in between collecting garbage he has a series of sexual escapades that seem impossibly jaded for one so young. While other boys his age are swimming or surfing, he's dressing up in a full-body suit of latex, having anonymous sex in men's rooms and exploring kinky sex with any willing male he can find. Just so you know how kinky he is, in one scene he masturbates in the shower while strangling himself with the shower-massage cord. You have to wonder where the imagination comes from, then you realize that the writer-director has been harboring some pretty extreme sexual fantasies about the neighborhood garbage men. Sergio finally meets a man who's not interested, because he's straight. This was not the first or last thing in this film I didn't get; when I was that age, I understood that some guys just couldn't be had, so I shrugged my shoulders and moved on. Not Sergio. He takes obsession to unheard of heights, especially for an 18 year old. He stalks the swimmer, goes through his garbage, and steals his torn old swimsuit.

In one of the first of many explicit sexual encounters in O Fantasma, Sergio comes upon a policeman handcuffed and gagged in the backseat of a patrol car. He masturbates the cop to orgasm, leaves him tied up, and then runs off to work, where he spends the rest of the night sniffing his hand and licking the residue. I hoped that the director's commentary would explain how and why the cop is tied up in his own squad car, but his sole comment on the soundtrack is, "You don't understand in the film why the cop is handcuffed". I didn't understand it in the audience, either. In one scene, Sergio is busy cleaning the doghouse, when he turns and sees the foreman standing in the door. He pushes past, their faces register some indications of conflict, and then the foreman shuts the door. The director's commentary on this action is, "The door closes, and you know what will happen, but you don't see it". Uh, no, I'm afraid the relationship between Sergio and the foreman is the least developed of all the underdeveloped relationships in this film, so what happens next is anybody's guess. Not that I cared; Sergio is the only character whose personality is even partially explored, and all we ever learn about him is that he's sexually kinky to the max. The picture goes on endlessly, with Sergio refusing to let go of his obsession for the swimmer, until he has the most excruciatingly slow breakdown ever recorded in a movie. At the same time, what little there is of coherence also breaks down. The director's commentary infuriated me even more toward the end; after spending most of the commentary praising the cooperation, talent and maturity of his young lead, he proclaims, "It is cruel to say it, but he wants to continue acting, and I think he will not act again. I will not use him in my next film…it's like his body has been used up". I haven't had the benefit of seeing anything else by Mr. Rodrigues, but if given the choice of viewing his next film or Ricardo Meneses next appearance I think I'd opt for the beautiful boy any day. After botching the attempted kidnapping of his beloved obsession, Sergio takes off to spend the balance of the film wordlessly running. The final scenes treat us to a guided tour of the sights, sounds (and by way of commentary) smells of a garbage dump. Sergio wanders through the dump clutching a live rabbit he finds among the garbage ("I saw the rabbits there" says the director, "so it's believable"). Grasping for a final metaphor, he remarks "He is like a cross between a bug and an insect" a comment that seems to me to be a cross between the idiotic and the insipid. He then ends this drivel after the slowest twenty minutes of film I've ever sat through by more or less telling us he didn't really know how to end it – like I hadn't figured that out a full ten minutes before the end credits started running. As Sergio continues to stumble on into the dawn before the final fadeout, the director says, "I could bring him back to the city, but that would not make much sense". The idea of a scene that might not make much sense didn't prevent him from filming the other 90 minutes of this drek – I dare say he should have gone for it.

My Summary above just about says it all. This is a Portugese film directed by Joao Pedro Rodrigues, & starring in his first & only role to date Ricardo Meneses who was barely 17 when this film was made in 2000. (he went back to his home town to work his widowed mothers farm).

His portrayal of Sergio shows raw, rare acting ability,Hopefully he will return to the screen.

Sergio is a garbage collector,He is also very animalistic in his relations with people,He is very sensual looking & his sexual scenes are very erotic & well done, BUT are not lurid, the are very well handled.

I was most impressed with the first 70 or so minutes, the last 20 or so minutes delves into a fantasy situation, that to me did not work that well. If these end scenes made more sense, my rating would have been higher.

The acting by the rest of the cast is good, & the production is well done..

There is frontal male nudity & male-male sex. However this is not a gay themed film.The sex scenes are just sex scenes period.

Ratings: *** (out of 4) 82 points (out of 100) IMDb (7 out of 100)

I wonder if this movie came from book, that would be like E. L. James erotic novel, "Fifty Shades of Grey". I'm not counting but many explicit graphics that show Sérgio's dark side of obsession.

I have to say, actually, this is a beautiful work of art and I really enjoy it from start to final. I almost curious in every minutes and said, "What another crap that he will do next?". Honestly, I'm excited.

I'm more comfortable to called this movie as fantasy than drama. Because, even it's hard to believe, I don't think that any kind of obsession expose in this movie are real in real world.

Sérgio (played by Ricardo Meneses) was young man working in town street cleaning service. His sexual fantasy begin when he found an cuffed policeman and giving him a hand job. His fantasy become more darker. He dug some garbage bin and found things from it and touch himself.

His biggest obsession was another young man, healthy, handsome, and more wealthy from him, apparently a swimmer. He begin to follow him and "stole" his broken speedo and used it as sexual stimulation.

His peak obsession was by kidnap his dream guy from his sleep but the very bizarre part when he left the swimmer guy un-touch. Maybe, feeling guilty, he left home and begin phantasm (shadow) with full dark surfer cloth and live with garbage.

I think his sexual explicit scene, like having real gay fellatio in bathroom with stranger, masturbation that hurt himself, even with almost his full frontal nudity scenes were supposed to mean his sexual liberty from his obsessed man, the swimmer.

I will give director Joao Pedro Rodrigues this: he has his own vision about what eroticism is supposed to be like among the disenfranchised and the forgotten and is willing to stick to his own convictions with the release of his movie O FANTASMA. He's found an impromptu performer in Ricardo Meneses who looks like a more masculine Farley Granger and moves on screen like the embodiment of carnality looking for its complement. Now, if only his movie fared better.

For its first two thirds, the movie concerns in how one young man's obsession starts to creep out of its known boundaries. Sergio is the sanitation department worker who seems to have a fascination with communicating only through grunts. His closest attachment is a dog that he's made his. He even imitates the mannerisms of the dog, and when a female co-worker clumsily flirts with him, he retreats into this "canine" behavior in a sequence that goes on for too long and brings practically zilch into the story, but makes its point: our Sergio cannot communicate well. He's the taciturn type.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But even in the laziest of erotic stories there is a vague internal life within the main character. There's some description as to who this person is, what he wants, where he comes from. Sergio is given none. Nothing except his overpowering desires, although this isn't such a bad thing if the story had something plausible to say. I've read volumes of gay erotica in my time and even the raunchiest had something to hold onto, however vague, to sustain my interest in the story being told, even if it dealt with themes of debasement like this story does.

Why we're made to believe that he has some interest in his female co-worker I don't know. It looks like filler and would have fared better if the character had been male, and someone real as opposed to idealized. His encounters, while believable on paper, seem ridiculous on screen: his dog leads him to a car where he finds a man in handcuffs. He makes no attempt to help the man but decides he might as well "give him a hand." Nice citizen! But there's no mention, no explanation as to why this man is even there, who he may be, or even if this is just Sergio's imagination gone wild since later a cop finds him curled up against the object of his lust's motorcycle.

As a matter of fact, another person's objects become Sergio's focus. Since he can't have the guy he's pining for (and he knows it), he decides to start collecting the guy's properties. Someone call for a restraining order, especially since he "marks his spot" by peeing on the guy's bed, but apparently this may not work out in Portugal. Anyway... the more Sergio delves in his desire, the more brutal his sexual "encounters" become. The problem is, none of them have any relation to the real world and happen for the sake of happening. Or at least, to bring forth the erroneous idea that BDSM is a lifestyle for the sick and twisted.

Which is exactly what this movie becomes once it hits its last 30 minutes. If at least it had managed to sustain my interest through its disjointed sexual encounters, out of the blue, with no warning, I was hit with one of the worst transitions I've seen on film. Whether the director has a fetishism with the superhero of which this story is named after I cannot say but it made my skin crawl. I just can't believe I sat through this protracted end, but there it is, I did it, and I took a shower right after seeing this. Because for a film that looks and feels like an open toilet in a dingy bathroom, this is all I could do.

If you crave a gay-themed film full of brooding obsession, gloomy (and very well done) night photography, the occasional graphic sex scene, and METAPHORS so obvious even a high school film class could catch them, then this just might be your cup of tea. Howewver, if you are looking for a film that sustains its running time and subject, then you are out of luck.

To be fair, Portugese director João Pedro Rodrigues has made some daring choices here. Dialogue is minimal--this might as well be a silent film with sound effects. He's working one of the great themes--the boundary between dream and reality and the dangers of ignoring that boundary. There is the further theme of sexual oppression triggering further oppressions. And yes, there is more than a little bondage mixed in. (This is no 50s MGM musical.) It looks good--night photography, lots of back-light and black surfaces, either dull or glittering. Sergio (played by Ricardo Meneses, a garbageman in Lisbon, drifts further and further into his obsession with a hunky young swimmer (and Sergio is pretty hunky himself). While not obsessing, he drifts from one random sexual encounter to another. Finally, he goes off the beam completely (I won't go into all the details in case you decide to see it).

The problem is the same that so many self-consciously arty films, from Greed to The Unbearable Lightness of Being, share--their metaphors are too obvious (here, among others, it's human and animal behavior--Sergio's best relationship is with his dog and he lapses into canine behavior periodically) and they are just too long. O Fantasma would make a pretty good 40 minutes festival film--at 90 minutes, it just drags, particularly the ending with Sergio wandering interminably in a landfill in a rubber bondage suit. (Come to think of it, kind of an echo of the equally tedious final sequence of Greed.) I admit it--I really haven't the patience for films that scream out how ARTFUL they are and have little or nothing except style, attitude, and angst. Style and attitude--think Fred Astaire--can be a winning combination. Unfortunately, in spite of lashings of kink and plenty of existential hysteria, this is not a winning film. Basically, it's a bore.