O Fantasma (2000)

Ode to Ricardo Meneses

When it was released in 2000, O Fantasma, which translates as The Phantom or The Ghost, had an in-your-face sexual feverishness that got it noticed on the gay festival circuit and later in the pages of Art Forum in 2010, where Dennis Lim attempted to make a case for its Portuguese director, João Pedro Rodrigues. “Literal trash cinema, O Fantasma finds a poetic synchronicity between the furtive compulsions that drive no-strings hookups and the nightly rounds of garbage collectors,” wrote Lim, “both generally unseen rituals of a city’s ghost world.”

O Fantasma was shot in Lisbon, yet this is not the gorgeous Lisbon of Alain Tanner’s In the White City (1983) but a locale defined by dim street lamps and cops that might come around to sexually menace you; in one of the most memorable scenes in this movie, we also encounter a cop who is tied-up for reasons that remain a mystery. Rodrigues is big on mystery, primal urges that can feel childlike, and the symbolism of sexual fantasies.

Rodrigues, who lives in an apartment he inherited from his grandparents in Lisbon, wrote a film treatment based on the fantasies he had about the garbagemen working outside his windows during the night, for he is a nighttime person, and O Fantasma is a nighttime movie, grubby, under-lit, and existing in some liminal space where any sexual fantasies of domination and submission are allowed and viewed without judgment.

Key to O Fantasma was the casting of the main character, Sérgio, a young garbage collector who either descends into animalistic behavior or fulfills his true nature through doing so; it is an open question whether what we see happening on screen is actually occurring and not just an onanistic fantasy on Sérgio’s part and the part of his director.

Rodrigues saw what he needed in the first young guy he auditioned for the part, Ricardo Meneses, who had come to the city from a farm in the north of Portugal and wore a cross around his neck; he had been homeless at first at age 16, but by the time he auditioned for O Fantasma Meneses was working at a gay bar. He liked being looked at, and Rodrigues enjoyed looking at him, and that was crucial, yet Rodrigues saw 299 other candidates for this role before coming back to Meneses. Which makes it sound likely that Rodrigues was living out a fantasy just as much as his protagonist was, and without either shame or judgment of himself for doing so.

“The story was written before I met him,” Rodrigues said of Meneses, “but lots of things changed thinking of him, the way he moved, the way he looked, the way he stared.” The film is ruled by Meneses and his harsh glare, by the way he moves increasingly like a predatory animal through the dark spaces of the film, and what’s so disturbing is that his character is capable of aggression but as a small and young guy he is also forced to submit to sexual aggression himself from his boss at work, though this might just be his fantasy of submission.

There is no way around this: O Fantasma is in large part a movie about the many different ways that Rodrigues can stare at Meneses’s body, in blue jeans, in a Speedo, in black underwear, in black latex, in black latex with the back unzipped (maybe the hottest look of all), and fully nude. This is a jerk-off movie, in several senses. As cinephile Jose Arroyo observed in a podcast about this picture, there is a curious mixed visual message in the first shot of Meneses’s Sérgio as we watch him violate a heterosexual jock he has kidnapped, for Sérgio would seem to be the criminal dominant here, yet his black latex suit is open in back, and so he is also “open for business” sexually, as Arroyo notes, for the camera.

Meneses was required to do a scene where he gets a hard-on in a public restroom and gets sucked off by another guy there, and Rodrigues noted that he had to get some Brazilian porno movies for Meneses so this scene could be done, which signaled the sexual frankness of films coming from Europe in this era. This is Meneses’s actual body, no prosthesis, no buffer of any kind; he is being asked to offer all of himself up to the camera, and he does so in the spirit of liberation, but there is a very dark side to it.

In O Fantasma, Rodrigues uninhibitedly multiplies sexual fantasy possibilities, and this is what gives the film its Sadean charge, which is never safe or comfortable. It implicates us in what we see and feel about the fantasies on display, and it dramatizes the sort of youthful sexual hunger that can lead people to doing very dangerous or crazy or risky things in the service of some ecstatic or abject release from that pressure, which might only increase with such release. There is a near-delirious sequence where Meneses’s Sérgio is spying on a naked male neighbor across the way, and Meneses is shot in profile so that he very well might be female while the neighbor is semi-hard and seems to be aware of being watched, and so gender expectations have utterly collapsed here.

In the audio commentary for the O Fantasma DVD, Rodrigues and his creative and personal partner João Rui Guerra da Mata sound like rather neurotic intellectual aesthetes who see pretty much everything in cinematic or voyeuristic terms, and when they talk about Meneses they can sound very detached, if not heartless. Rodrigues speaks in a hushed, nearly hallucinatory voice, and it seems as if he would like to have sympathy for Meneses if only sympathy were something more readily available to him.

 “I think he’s very narcissistic,” Rodrigues says of his lead actor when da Mata tentatively asks him if Meneses enjoyed being so sexually objectified in O Fantasma. “It’s a bit cruel,” Rodrigues admits. “Ricardo wants to be an actor, but I’m not sure he is going to act.” Rodrigues says he will not use Meneses in another film, partly because one of his directorial idols, Robert Bresson, only wanted his non-actor “models” for one film apiece.

There is an immaculate loneliness to Meneses’s screen presence in O Fantasma, particularly since his most memorable scenes are those of an auto-erotic nature where he jerks off in the Speedo of the straight stud he is stalking and strangles himself with a shower cord to intensify his pleasure and, indelibly, when he licks the wall of a shower as if his desire has permeated everything around him, one of the great film images of sexual striving for some kind of spiritual completion.

Meneses looks far younger and more vulnerable in the few photos of him online that are not from O Fantasma. No one today wants to discuss the enormous pleasure to be had from being viewed as sexually desirable, particularly if you were not viewed as viable in this way in adolescence, and it is only luck if that pleasure comes without any sort of price. Meneses is said to have gone back to help his mother on her farm in the north of Portugal, even though it is easy to imagine his dominating stare and his hidden vulnerability in other films. O Fantasma is his only credit, and on IMDb it says that he died on October 8, 2010 at age 29. It is a loss worth noting.