‘Two Drifters’ afloat on the sea of desire

Think of the Portugese director Joao Pedro Rodrigues as an animal behaviorist who specializes in human beings. In his first feature, “O Fantasma,” released in the U.S. in 2002, a lonely, lustful garbage collector is seized by the urge to don a latex cat suit and prowl the streets. The lost souls in Rodrigues’ “Two Drifters” stick to their street clothes, but the urges that grip them are just as powerful and as unfathomable.

Rui (Nuno Gil) has reason to act irrationally. As “Two Drifters” begins, he’s passionately celebrating his one-year anniversary with Pedro (Joao Carreira). Two minutes later, he’s cradling his lover’s corpse on the hood of a smashed car, weeping as the sky opens up above them.

As for Odete (Ana Cristina de Oliveira), chalk it up to baby fever, or a case of supernatural possession. A roller-skating store clerk with a Snoopy fixation, Odete is as unformed as raw clay until a brush with a pregnant shopper turns her thoughts toward motherhood.

Her boyfriend splits when she announces she’s stopped taking the pill, but when Odete wanders into Pedro’s wake, the perfect opportunity presents itself and she announces to Pedro’s grieving mother that he is the father of her unborn child.

As in “O Fantasma,” the characters’ buried desires express themselves through their bodies. Although Odete’s pregnancy test is negative, her abdomen begins to swell all the same. False result? Hysterical pregnancy? Or are those mysterious gusts that follow Odete around a sign that Pedro’s spirit lingers, seeking an earthly vessel for a reunion with his lost love?

“Two Drifters” answers some of those questions, but Rodrigues has little use for explanations. His interest is in behavioral extremes, moments when the human animal is at its least self-conscious and most feral. Beginning with a close-up of Rui and Pedro’s lips locked in a disembodied embrace, he shoots body parts disconnected from the whole, grasping hands and gravid bellies that need not consult the cerebral cortex to make their influence felt.

Rodrigues values “virgin bodies” in the casting process, but acting without thinking is a tall order, and his untutored players aren’t always up to the task. Gil manages his hunky brooding effectively, but De Oliveira veers from blankness to hysteria in the bat of an eyelash, her unchained cackling the stuff of low-grade melodrama.

Luckily, pop music fills in when performance falls short. The strangled longing of Big Star’s “Kanga Roo” accompanies Rui on an anguished late-night drive, while an eerie children’s-choir reading of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” plays as Odete, an empty carriage at her side, curls up on Pedro’s grave. There’s no room for the Smiths’ “Still Ill,” with its apposite question, “Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?” but the appropriate album cover can be spotted in Rui’s apartment.

With a title nicked from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Two Drifters” styles itself as a classical romance, albeit one in which half the couple is either deceased or deranged.

Climaxing with a union as heartfelt as it is perverse, the movie asserts with eccentric force the belief that love knows no bounds, be they physical, spiritual or sensible.

*

‘Two Drifters’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Distributed by Strand Releasing. Director Joao Pedro Rodrigues. Screenplay Rodrigues, Paulo Rebelo. Producer Maria Joao Sigalho. Cinematographer Rui Pocas. Editor Paulo Rebelo. In Portuguese with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.

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