Will-o'-the-Wisp (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2022) (Patreon)

TIFF WAVELENGTHS 2022

Since his feature film debut O Fantasma back in 2000, João Pedro Rodrigues has been one of the most protean filmmakers on the international scene. His emergence coincided with the general rediscovery of Portuguese film in the late 90s / early 00s, and in certain respects Rodrigues' style and attitude reflects an unholy alliance between two of that nation's cinematic grand masters. Where certain of his films, in particular The Last Time I Saw Macao and The King's Body, display a formalist concern with theatricality and Baroque pictorialism reminiscent of Manoel de Oliveira, his more outré plotting and subject matter, seen in The Ornithologist and To Die Like a Man, tip their hat to perennial outside João César Monteiro. In certain ways, Rodrigues' latest feature represents a comic combination of those two distinct tendencies.

And at the same time, Will-o'-the-Wisp displays affinities with more contemporary queer bricoleurs such as John Greyson and Gabriel Abrantes. Clocking in at a compact, fully satisfying 67 minutes -- a short ass movie in every respect -- Will-o'the-Wisp is a critical inquiry into Portuguese history staged as intellectual gay porno, a Hottest Hunks of the Fire Brigade charity calendar that lights upon the legacy of colonialism, Western visual culture, and the ornamental irrelevance of Portugal's faded aristocracy. Depicting a world in which the insulated 1% retains overt ties to the monarchy, Rodrigues implicitly argues that if you can't exactly eat the rich, we should at least be able to jerk off to them, perhaps the only use-value they might offer for society.

The film opens in 2069, with King Alfredo (Joel Branco) on his deathbed. Alfonso is a royal without an heir, and Rodrigues clearly depicts his death as the end of a particular set of national ideals. But this is no Royalist nostalgia piece. As we see, Rodrigues envisions a Last Monarch who wasn't violently deposed but instead ushered the royal line gently into oblivion, with a combination of noblesse oblige and a poignant homosexual dignity. When Alfonso observes his young great-nephew playing with a toy fire truck, all his memories come flooding back. The majority of Will-o'-the-Wisp takes place in an extended flashback to a fantastical present-day, as the young Alfredo (Mauro Costa) shocks his family by announcing that he, sole heir to the throne, would actually become useful. He would become a firefighter.

This course of action was partly inspired by a walk in the forest with his father (Miguel Loureiro), where he sang an ode to trees that was so stimulating that, well, it gave Alfredo wood. The towering erectile majesty of the forest becomes a fetish object for the young lad, but unlike most others in the throes of perverse desire, Alfredo adopts a protective posture toward the forest. If the trees are wonderful enough to turn him on, they deserve his stewardship. And so, in the parlance, the future king of Portugal becomes a Lorax who fucks.

In the course of his firefighter training, Alfredo falls in love with his mentor, Afonso (André Cabral), a Black firefighter who moonlights as a grad student in sociology. His complete competence is a strong match for Alfredo's initial uselessness, and this sets up the primary dynamic driving Rodrigues' film. The colonial subject becomes the master, the Black man ridicules but also mentors the white man, and the selflessness of firefighters in reconfigured as active passion. When Alfredo and Afonso have a tryst in the woods, Rodrigues has them jokingly berate each other with racial epithets, opening acknowledging their difference while also embracing it completely. In under two minutes, Will-o'-the-Wisp both parodies and subverts the premises of Jeremy O. Harris' Slave Play, by emphasizing the second word over the first.

If there's really anything wrong with Will-o'-the-Wisp, and I'm not at all sure there is, it would probably be its brevity. Rodrigues hurtles through a ton of complex topics very quickly, offering only thumbnail sketches of weighty matters like colonialism, race, and sexuality. It's almost as if the filmmaker challenged himself to cram as may critical ideas and creative gestures as possible. And yet Will-o'-the-Wisp never feels incomplete. Rodrigues has taken the musical comedy concept very seriously, and this means that we wants to provoke his viewers to think, but moves on whenever anything threatens to stop being fun. This is Rodrigues at his breeziest and most nonchalant, and it still ends up being more intellectually provocative than almost any other film out there. It's just a pleasure to behold.