5 - Queer Metamorphoses and Displacements in the Cinema of João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata

Summary

INTRODUCTION

João Pedro Rodrigues and João Rui Guerra da Mata's joint filmography is extremely diverse, but recurring themes do emerge, with the trope of metamorphosis perhaps being the prime example. João Pedro Rodrigues himself has recognized this, as I have explored in a previous study of O Fantasma (Phantom, 2000). In the present chapter, however, I will demonstrate how, as well as being a recurrent theme in the two filmmakers’ oeuvre, metamorphosis is also strongly interwoven with the spatial dimension in their works.

Beginning with their first film, and again in films such as Morrer Como um Homem (To Die Like a Man, 2009), Odete (Two Drifters, 2005), and O Ornitólogo (The Ornithologist, 2016), we witness more or less intense processes of identity transformation, or indeed, actual metamorphoses. The main characters undergo mutations that are sometimes radical, against a backdrop of spatial displacement (places, environments) that is not a mere framework but rather plays an active and instrumental role in these transformations. Changes in space and identity thus become inextricably connected within transformative processes of reciprocal cooperation and improvement. The basic connection between these changes and spaces operates through the characters’ actual bodily reality, that is to say, their corporeality. The characters’ bodies are the physical loci of their transformations precisely because they function as their point of connection to the spatial environments through which they move and by which they are affected.

The characters are thoroughly engaged in experimental processes of selffashioning, which ground and revolve around their lived, bodily, sexual, and gender realities, as those realities are experienced in the characters’ use of space. Transformations of identity are partially compulsory (they follow external pressure), and partially deliberately sought; but they all affect individuals who are not at ease with their own situation—wherever that may be—and who are also at odds with their own inadequate bodily realities. As subjects, they are the target of some threat to their lives, which confronts them with the imminent collapse of their initial identities, and with the imperative to become-other(s) (devenir-autre(s)) and thereby commit to an actual journey, at the end of which they will become different subjects because they can no longer be who they initially were, nor can they stay where they are.