An off-balance provocation by Portuguese agitator João Pedro Rodríguez, “Will o’ the Wisp” is a disguised prank, a plastic boutonniere that sprays battery acid. This joke is for everyone, especially those in power and those who hope they will save the planet.
Portugal started its monarchy in 1910, but in this alternate timeline, the royal family still reigns. When good-natured Prince Alfredo (Mauro Costa) shocks his family by becoming a firefighter, Rodriguez sends him to a beefcake feast in an erotic firehouse and poses suggestively for the combatants. I made up a calendar shoot. The director then puts together a slideshow of the genitals of an annoying blonde prince and his working-class black lover Afonso (Andre Cabral) in different climates. (Petrified forests, barren grasslands – no need to use your imagination to find similarities.)
Co-scripted by Rodriguez, Joao Ruy Guerra da Mata, and Paulo López Graça, the film begins with Alfredo on his deathbed in 2069, and features some of the film’s most subtle sex scenes. A depiction is drawn. Then there’s a flashback to the Prince’s youth, where he’s escorted by the King (Miguel Loureiro) through an old pine room. Some viewers may recognize this forest as Leiria Pine Forest. Its wood and sap were used to build the ships that built the Portuguese Empire.Leiria is Destroyed by wildfires in 2017, and interstitial titles “Slash and Burn,” “Scorched,” etc. make it clear that blazes are coming for everyone. Smoke drifts through the palace as the Conservative Queen (Margarida Vila-Nova) anxiously extinguishes her candles.
The symbolism is candid, and the cinematic style is striking and grim. Scenes are staged as accurately as a painted tableau, with beautiful shadows and vain whippets. On one occasion, the Prince stood at the dinner table and turned to camera Greta Thunberg’s speech at the United Nations Climate Action Summit: “All eyes of future generations are on you” as if He conveyed it as if to persuade the audience he was trying to get.what his parents should do something. His mother is unfazed, instead making a fuss about giving the family’s 18th-century oil painting a more politically correct title. It is a mockery of eight black and indigenous dwarves assembled by Queen Maria I of Portugal (and known as Maria I in Brazil). gone crazy).
We already know that even when the prince grows up, he can’t fix a big deal. (Cinematographer Louie Pocas and sound editor Nuno Carvalho skillfully evoke a bleak airship-patrolling future, using only shadows and loudspeakers.) I have preserved it, which evokes fantasies of love affairs with Afonso. Their fleeting moments of joy take up most of the screen time. Rodriguez’s mind is in social turmoil, but his heart is in Afonso’s gorgeously glowing abdomen and just below.
Rodriguez blew the good taste away in a scorched forest with a blatant show of tete a tete as brave leaders spewed racist slurs on each other’s underworld. It’s rough around the edges, but Rodriguez balances this shocking scene with a scene of shocking loveliness. In this dance number, the slight rigidity of the two makes their explosive emotional expressions feel gentle and sincere.
Will O The Wisp
Unrated. Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes. at the theater.
