THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
Raw and queer, who better than Joao Pedro Rodrigues, the rare bird of Portuguese cinema, could handle these two “concepts” in an enjoyable comedy? Here is Will-o’-the-wisp, a siren-screaming love story between a black firefighter, Afonso (André Cabral) and a white prince, Alfredo (Mauro Costa). Fogo-Fatuo (Portuguese title) is also a musical fantasy and a meticulous work of political fiction: in one hour and seven minutes, shot after shot, like a magic slate, the film plastically reinvents itself, as if it were necessary to speed up time and abandon the traumas of the contemporary era in the locker room of a barracks.
Born in 1966, Joao Pedro Rodrigues could have become an ornithologist, following in the footsteps of his scientific parents. But he branched off into the cinema, keeping his taste for observation intact, exploring the impulse of desire through the prism of Portuguese society and its popular or religious characters – such as Saint Anthony, a figure in two of his films, Morning of Saint Anthony (2012) and The Ornithologist (2016). The director of O Phantasma (2000) takes pleasure in diverting traditional, ethnographic imagery to create new imaginaries.
Will-o’-the-wisp opens in the year 2069: white as a sheet, old King Alfredo (Joel Branco) is dying, but he smiles at the sight of the black Playmobil fireman, at the very top of the ladder, that a child left on his bed. A tender evocation of his lover of yesteryear, Afonso, whose story the filmmaker immediately rewinds. Back to the 2010s: once upon a time there was Prince Alfredo with brown curls, steeped in republican ideas; attached to the royal pine forest that he surveyed as an adolescent with his father (the undergrowth providing the young man with his first surges of sap), and tired of seeing the forests burning from the dining room screen, Alfredo decided to go and fight the fire as a simple volunteer.
From mouth-to-mouth to burning kiss
The commanding officer of the barracks, a flamboyant redhead, is laughing: another nerd who arrives! Alfredo studies the history of art, and his colleague Afonso ethnography… The latter initiates the heir to the throne to the gestures that save, which will mutate into collective choreography to the sound of industrial pop from the Portuguese group Ermo.
From then on, the “copy-paste” operates as an end-to-end process, building the film, bringing together scraps of stories to form a whole. In the pine forest, survival word-of-mouth becomes searing kiss, then sex connects to race – Alfredo reveling in the ” chocolate bar “ of Afonso and vice versa – as if we could laugh at everything, and so on, until the ultimate diversion: in close-up, Rodrigues films overinflated fake penises, the special effects revisiting the codes of porn and creating new erotic artifices, at the crossroads of fake and real.
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