“Odete” takes the magical and primal rawness of “O Fantasma” and turns it into a well-rehearsed, politely chronological, easy-to-digest series of events filled with synthetic drama.

After the incredible success of an artist’s first release, it is often the case that the second attempt in the art world is a letdown. “Odete,” which won a Cinémas de Recherche – Special Mention at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, gives continuity to that feared “one-hit wonder” tendency.

Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues’ last feature film, “O Fantasma” (2000), was an extremely original and organic exploration of human sexuality that took the festival circuit by surprise and gained cult status throughout Europe.

But “Odete,” which has the misleading promise of a good premise, unravels its plot in overtly conventional ways and overestimates how much we care about its characters. And, worse, if we even believe in their reasons for being in the first place.

The film begins with a tragic death, which will bring two strangers together: the victim’s (Pedro) lonely boyfriend (Rui) and a neighbor the deceased never even knew (Odete). And, for some reason, Odete directs her own loneliness (she just broke with her boyfriend, who didn’t want to impregnate her) toward the dead guy, pretending she is carrying his baby.

In one of the few intelligently fresh scenes, set at Pedro’s funeral, his coffin lies in the middle of a room. His relatives have all fallen asleep, except for Odete, who interacts with the dead body and takes the commitment band off of his finger with her mouth.

Her motives aren’t very clear and the morose silence feels refreshing and intriguing — a strategy Rodrigues will unfortunately not repeat throughout the film.

The idea of a straight woman and a gay man being brought together by a dead link seems quite original and alluring as cinematic possibility. But Rodrigues is more worried about advancing the plot — and packing it with as much pointless melodrama as possible — than about investigating the character’s emotional truths. Expect slapping; screaming; unexpected, violent kisses; people talking to the dead and even a case of “hysterical pregnancy.”

Instead of keeping it simple, he transforms the film into a soap-opera-like series of events that will ultimately culminate in female madness. And not the kind of madness that makes us wonder — Gena Rowlands in “Woman under the influence,” Bette Davis in “Whatever happened to Baby Jane?” — but the kind that makes us doubt.

In “O Fantasma” Rodrigues seemed to instinctively follow the unstoppable drives of his main character. The narrative developed itself much like automatic writing does: without second thought, unconcerned about the theatricality that has plagued much of cinema.

The camera tracked this man and his inexorable need for physical satisfaction to the point where he is more animal than human, a defenseless victim of his own ID, an unorganized war of carnal drives contained by the limits of his limbs.

But “Odete” takes the magical and primal rawness of “O Fantasma” and turns it into a well-rehearsed, politely chronological, easy-to-digest series of events filled with synthetic drama.

“O Fantasma” allowed the silence of its characters to speak. The path we witnessed the man in a rubber suit to take would make any intelligible dialogue redundant, unnecessary nuisance, which is what “Odete” is: obviousness over nuance. Its characters try to hard to let their uniqueness come through. Odete’s madness isn’t convincingly contained nor subtly constructed. It is the kind of screaming madness that feels closer to archetype than humanity.

And Rui, a better-behaved version of Brian Kinney, achieves little more than the inexpressive reification of contemporary cinema’s vision of modern gay men: loft-inhabiting, nightlife-adoring, melancholy-driven chain-smokers.

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