“Goodbye Lady from Macao” reads a newspaper
headline at the end of Joaõ Pedro Rodrigues and Joaõ Rui Guerra da Mata’s short
Red Dawn (2011), an unnervingly straightforward view of fish and
livestock being sliced open in Macao’s Red Market. This tribute to the recently
departed Jane Russell, the sultry wonder who starred opposite Robert Mitchum in
Josef von Sternberg’s film noir Macao (1952), carries over into the
opening of their subsequent film and first co-directed feature, The Last
Time I Saw Macao, as the glamorous Candy (played by trans performer Cindy
Scrash) lip-synchs Russell’s recording of “You Kill Me” from Macao
while tigers prowl in a cage behind her. “I’m certain, I’m positive that my
love will survive,” Russell/Candy croons, “Because you kill me, and keep me so
alive.”
Desire and despair courses through nearly all the
collaborations of the Portuguese pair, which began with Rodrigues’ 1997 short Happy
Birthday! (in which Guerra da Mata played the leading role) and have since
primarily showcased Rodgrigues as writer-director and Guerra da Mata as art
director and production designer. (Guerra da Mata also served as co-writer on
Rodrigues’ 2009 feature To Die Like a Man.) Rodrigues’ previous
features often feel like horror films, their monsters born of the characters’
insatiable desires: O Fantasma (2000) follows the adventures of a
young trash collector as he prowls for sex through a nocturnal Lisbon, his lust
for a resistant stud eventually transforming him into a bizarre, leather-clad
spectre; in Odete (2005), a young woman’s obsession with a dead man
drives her to reincarnate him within herself; while in To Die Like a Man,
an aging drag queen’s irreconcilable desires to live like a woman while
retaining her biological birthright turns fatal after her wracked and crumbling
body rejects the female hormones she has been taking to maintain her hybrid
self.
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