3 - Love is Stronger than Death: João Pedro Rodrigues’s Two Drifters and the Ghost(s) of Manoel de Oliveira

Summary

“Yes. I was dead. I’ve come back from down there.”

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF MANOEL DE OLIVEIRA

The subject of this chapter may be surprising at first glance. When we talk about Odete (Two Drifters, 2005), João Pedro Rodrigues's melodramatic second feature film, it is unlikely that we think immediately of the work of Manoel de Oliveira. Rather, the affinity to classical cinema in Two Drifters is more readily observed, and especially the affinity to classical melodrama, with Douglas Sirk being the first filmmaker to come to mind. Aside from that most obvious reference, Rodrigues's work shows a recognizable debt to other filmmakers, such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, or Pedro Almodóvar.

In this chapter, however, I do not aim to explore the connections between Rodrigues and other melodrama directors, whether classical, as in the case of Sirk and Mankiewicz, or postclassical, such as Fassbinder or Almodóvar. Furthermore, I do not intend to argue that João Pedro Rodrigues is a direct artistic heir of Manoel de Oliveira. I will not even try to prove that Oliveira is a crucial influence in Two Drifters, which is a film full of both explicit and veiled cinematographic references to films such as Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Blake Edwards's Switch (1991), or Jerry Zucker's Ghost (1990).

In his published conversation with Antoine Barraud, Rodrigues comments on the work of Manoel de Oliveira. In his discussion of the older filmmaker's influence on his work, Rodrigues highlights the “carnal presence” and the “Buñuel-like perversity” of Oliveira's characters, and the fact that the director seems to believe in “unreality” above all things. According to Rodrigues, the films directed by Oliveira are markedly artificial and “unreal,” yet not in a way that stresses that falsity, but rather one that confirms Oliveira's perception of life as artificial and unreal. This relation to a problematic notion of realism is certainly one of the fundamental traits shared by both filmmakers.

In this chapter, I argue that even if the similarities between Rodrigues and Oliveira are not self-evident, there are some crucial echoes of Oliveira's (romantic) ghost stories in the films of Rodrigues, and especially in Two Drifters, Rodrigues's queer take on that same genre.