Will-o'-the Wisp opens tomorrow in the US in limited release
I love my country's cinema, so it's only logical I would yearn for its appreciation beyond borders. Yet, sometimes that joy comes suffused with a nagging curiosity. Do foreign audiences 'get' these films? Even when they're praised are they lost in cultural mistranslations? Perhaps that's too narrow a viewpoint that overestimates how closed-off Portuguese cinema is in its specificities. There's a universal appeal to great cinema, audiovisual idioms can transcend national barriers.
Still, I love to talk with non-Portuguese friends about Portuguese cinema they love and find myself learning along the way. Indeed, I'd love to chat about João Pedro Rodrigues' latest, currently enjoying an American release in selected theaters. Even if you don't get all the details of Will-o'-the-Wisp, there's plenty to love, from fireman eroticism to cumshots, musical stylings, and artificiality unleashed. It's an orgasmic blast from beginning to end…
When Will-o'-the-Wisp first arrived in Portuguese theaters, Queen Elizabeth II of the UK had just died and, in a controversial move, the Portuguese government decreed national mourning to honor a historical ally. Please note that, unlike our Spanish neighbors, we are not a monarchy and haven't been one for over a century. As the film comes in the New World, the obscene expenditure of King Charles III's coronation is still fresh in the collective memory. In the face of such royal pageantry, Will-o'-the-Wisp tastes especially sweet, its attack on monarchic nostalgia as vicious as it is hilarious.
With only 67 minutes to spare, João Pedro Rodrigues starts taking the piss right away. The setting is Portugal in 2069, and the king is dying. The old man, called Alfredo, is nobody's king mind you, just a miserable relic of dynasties still holding on to the hopes of counter-revolution, professing their divine right to rule based on nothing but blood. And so, he lies penniless in a Republic that doesn't want him, the only connection to the splendor of yore in the form of a grand painting dripping with colonial racism that stands over his moribund body. Hateful, archaic, vicious nonsense through and through.
A boy plays over the soon-to-be corpse, his toy firetruck inducing the recollection of another time when the man was but a pretend-prince instead of a pretend-king. We're back to 2011 when a young Alfredo meanders through the gardens of memory and Portugal's dry woods. With his father, he talks of genetic superiority while a procession of hallucinatory private school children sings about trees. It's a bizarre tableau, made only weirder by how the paternal advice inspires his son's erection. No sooner we have had time to process this carnival of oddness and obscenity, the scene switches to a Buñuelian interior.
Posed in palatial folly, the 'royal' family talks in affected tones, their accents a parody of contemporary Portugal's very own royal relics, each mannerism an exaggeration based on real stupidities. Here, the references to national history are fired left and right, every line a jest picking at the scabs of national shame. Meanwhile, a rickety TV glows with news of forest fires, a real-life crisis that's only worsening as the years go by. Suddenly, it's as if things got too far away from fantasy, shocking Alfredo into rebellious action. Not even this dream can accommodate such horrors.
Inspired, the young fool decides to become a volunteer fireman, and off we go to the firefighter barracks. Off we go to a new degree of madness. Like the prince, we are to be seduced into a stupor of pleasure, privilege and prestige peeled away to leave only a body ready for passion, for sexualized choreography by a gaggle of hot hunks making puns between gay porn and classic painting. Among the men, one stands out – he's Afonso, named like Portugal's first king and so much nobler than our prince. In a way, he and Alfredo are defined by contrasts, from skin color to economic stratum, origin, class.
Such matters erect a wall between the two, but since this is a fairytale with a hard-on, opposites attract, a symbolic union akin to a miracle or perhaps a naughty joke. The fires they fight are bald-faced manifestations of attraction, want materialized in blazes before it can turn into an Arthur Freed-esque interlude soaked in horniness. But of course, their ecstasy must come in the woods, those places of wildfire and much national pain, healed for a second by a nonsensical 69-ing sequence complete with rubber cocks and cum facials.
Their dirty talk is hate speech, words denuded of their power and made into their targets' pleasure points. It's very fucked-up, and we haven't even arrived at a lesson in Portuguese flora where a new penis illustrates each tree in a dicktastic slideshow. The point is to subvert national iconographies others hold on to, using anti-naturalist, almost post-realist tactics to reveal the absurdity of such outdated beliefs. Confronting modern Portugal with a funhouse mirror reflection, Rodrigues aims for pleasure and provocation. His Will-o'-the-Wisp sings a fado of the phallus as it guides us toward a future to be achieved one orgasm at a time.
How do you interpret the madness of this film? Are you a fan of João Pedro Rodrigues' politically-charged, unashamedly queer musical fantasy?