João Pedro Rodrigues | Fogo-Fátuo (Will-o'-the-Wisp) / 2022

the politics of art and love

by Douglas Messerli

João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata and Paulo Lopes Graça (screenplay), João Pedro Rodrigues Fogo-Fátuo (Will-o'-the-Wisp) / 2022

 

Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues’ 2022 feature Will-o'-the-Wisp might be said to fit into his oeuvre much like I’m So Excited (2013) does in the cinematic works of Pedro Almodóvar, a highly sexually comic work that, although containing a great deal of social satire, more clearly has allowed a later career director pull down the curtain—or in Rodrigues’ case to open up the palace doors—concerning the director’s gay sexual focus. And although the Portuguese director has long been open about LGBT sexuality, this work is in some respects his most risky work to date.

    Certainly, the risks are not about locating the film’s center in the Portuguese royalty. In fact, Portugal did away with their royals in 1910. But in the fiction of the film the royal line behind the conquering of the Congo and Brazil is still in place in 2069. Crown Prince Alfredo (Joel Branco playing is elder self) is dying beneath his favorite painting, the 18th century work by José Conrado Roza, originally titled “The Marriage of Negro Rosa,” now retitled as his mother advises him, despite her complete disinterest in real social issues, “The Wedding Masquerade,” now hanging at the Museumdu Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, France. The blacks in this painting are depicted as what once were called “midgets,” now described as “little people.”

     But for Alfredo it is not likely a case of bigotry that draws him to the painting, as much as his youthful gay lover, as we shall soon discover, was a black firefighter. And cultural correctness, particularly as applied to the royal family in this film, stands as another layer of its satire.

     For none of the royals, except for Alfredo appear to care for anything but the images they represent. The film quickly takes us back to 2011 with the endlessly cigar-smoking king (Miguel Loureiro) compares the royal forests (the Leiria Pine Forest) with the uprightness of the royal family and almost burning down the forest as he tosses away a still-lit cigar butt (his son carefully puts it out with his foot).

     In 2017 the actual Leiria Pine Forest was subject to a major forest fire. And by the next scene representing a royal family dinner when, as The New York Times critic Amy Nicholson suggests,  “smoke wafts through the palace while the conservative queen (Margarida Vila-Nova) putters around anxiously snuffing candles.” In fact, the smoke in the palace is not from the forest, but emanating from the king’s cigar.

     And already Alfredo (now played by Mauro Costa) is beginning to feel frustrated with his family, and at one point, fed up with his mother’s meaningless piety, stands and delivers, as Carlos Aguilar of the Los Angeles Times puts it:

 

“Greta Thunberg’s now emblematic U.N. address before announcing to his conservative royal parents his desire to become a firefighter. Under the watch of an imposingly large painting depicting a group of Africans dressed in opulent attire, an inescapable nod to Portugal’s colonial past, this statement of youthful rebellion takes place in a static and ornate dinner shot.”

 

     The queen laughs at the utter absurdity of his desire, while the king sees it as an opportunity to put the royal name on yet another worthy organization by recognizing his son as a fire chief. But the pale and spindly boy insists he wants to work his way up from the bottom.

     In fact, those words will be taken quite literally by the director once the boy enters the world of the firehouse, where the female fire chief laughs at what she perceives is a whim, but also recognizes an opportunity perhaps for funding, putting him into the capable hands of a young fireman to training, Alfonso (André Cabral).

      Suddenly having come face to face with a nearly all-male world of the fireman’s locker room, Alfredo discovers the sexually randy firemen, dressed only in jockstraps or standing completely naked, test the art history student on his knowledge of art by enacting scenes from famous real and imaginary works of art by Caravaggio (“Fireman’s Head”), Francis Bacon (“Mr. Fireman, Bring Me a Dream”), Ruebens (“The Rape of Ganymede”) and others, creating sexually suggestive all-male tableaus by notably homosexual artists.

     Lessons in the positioning of the fire victims' bodies and artificial respiration bring Alfonso and Alfredo even closer, and before you know they are both gleefully sliding down the fire pole with surely their own poles just as erect as they engage in an erotic dance joined by the fire brigade, the zaftig fire chief and a clearly lesbian firewoman.

     In an interview with Jordan Cronk in Film Comment Rodrigues comments in his dance numbers he cinematically “looked to Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Demy, as well as Ginger Rogers–Fred Astaire and Stanley Donen–Gene Kelly musicals.”

 

    “ My choreographer, Madalena Xavier, and I watched a lot of musicals—and by that I mean classical musicals as well as music videos. ….Madelena is a dance teacher in Lisbon. Some of the firefighters were and are her students, including André Cabral, who plays Alfonso. Our main idea for the choreography was to establish a rhythm early on, in the sequence where the firefighters are going through their safety training—especially the First Aid Recovery Position routine. Those gestures were the starting point.”

     Yet Rodrigues’ sense of camp doesn’t stop there and he soon moves to a sex scene between Alfonso and Alfredo in the middle of a burned-out forest, strangely a place where there is nowhere to hide as the two engage in what’s described as the 69 position, both sucking one another’s cocks while they shout out racial slurs applicable to whites and blacks. (In case you might be shocked with the sight of actual on-screen fellatio, I can relieve your fears by telling you the penises are clearly dildos, a sight gag that perhaps makes the scene even more suggestive.)

    Later, Alfonso tests Alfredo’s knowledge of the various Portuguese stands of trees and forests by projecting a series of photographic slides of naked men’s penises.

    There is, in fact, almost a sense of the sacred in the firemen’s domain, as their sturdy, lithe bodies easily give way to one another in the only acts that the director seems to keep at a safe comic distance from his sardonic humor regarding the society, its perpetuation of racial abuse, and the general climatic degeneration of the planet.

     But all good things must end, so goes the cliché in a world filled with them, and with the king’s (and most of Alfredo’s family members’) death by Covid, he is forced to transform back from an individual into an imagined standard of heteronormativity and conformity. Alfred’s ties with the firemen and, in particular, his lover Alfonso need be cut off as Alfredo loses his identity to the people who, as he puts, “are always watching me.”

     As some critics such as Ryan Swen have noted, however, the true saving grace of this far-too-short romp of a film is its ambiguous shifting of time. At the Alfredo’s funeral in a small chapel, the major part of the attendees are the 2069 fire brigade and two gossipy older women, as well as the famous fado singer, Paulo Bragança,* telling the story of how during the performances of the song a masked man would appear, who turned out to be the king of Portugal. At about the same moment a man dressed in a hooded cloak enters and sits.

     The gossips shift over to be near to the intruder, suggesting that because he is in a chapel it is not proper to wear a head-covering. Standing, the stranger drops the hood to reveal an older Alfonso, who is immediately recognized by all as now the President of Portugal. Karma has won the day. The pale-white king has been replaced by his black former lover.

      There is little one can do with such an irreverent and wild discombobulated tale, but enjoy it.

 

*In his Film Comment interview, Rodrigues speaks of the fado singers used throughout the film: Amália Rodrigues. She’s our biggest fado singer ever—she’s like the Edith Piaf of Portugal. That’s her song playing in the scene where the main characters are having sex in the forest.

     It’s an amazing song but a hidden one, because it’s really racist. People pretend that she didn’t sing it. She was a very progressive person herself, but she sang fado, which is connected to a more conservative tradition. Even the song that’s performed in the film, “Fado do Embuçado” (“The Cloaked Man Fado”), by João Ferreira Rosa, is a very royalist song—it denotes nostalgia for the aristocracy and pre-Republican times. It tells the story of a man who always came to listen to fado wearing a cloak, and when he uncloaks himself he’s the king of Portugal—which is what the last scene of the film is referencing when the character uncloaks. In that scene I have the ’90s fado singer Paulo Bragança perform the song. I had used one of Bragança’s songs in To Die Like a Man, and I always wanted to work with him. He is a visionary and irreverent fado singer, who used to sing barefoot, wearing skirts or futuristic clothes, and somehow he revolutionized fado singing. He rearranged some very traditional fado songs for the film—he even changed the lyrics in one song so we could play on the similarities of the words fado and falo, which in Portuguese means phallus.

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).