‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’ Review: A Prince Throws Off His Privilege

“Will-o’-the-Wisp,” an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy costume, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everybody, notably the highly effective and people holding out hope that the highly effective will save the planet.

Portugal booted its monarchy in 1910, however on this alternate timeline, the royals nonetheless reign. When the do-gooder prince, Alfredo (Mauro Costa), shocks his household by turning into a firefighter, Rodrigues drops him into an eroticized firehouse for a beefcake feast, concocting a calendar shoot to bend the fighters into, um, suggestive poses. Later, the director assembles a slide present of genitalia which the waify blond prince and his working-class Black lover, Afonso (André Cabral), liken to numerous climates. (Petrified forest, barren grassland — you gained’t should pressure your creativeness to see the resemblance.)

The film, co-written by Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata and Paulo Lopes Graça, opens with Alfredo on his deathbed in 2069 — the movie’s most delicate sexual reference. Then it flashes again to the prince’s youth, the place he’s escorted by historic pines by the king (Miguel Loureiro). Some viewers may acknowledge the woods because the Leiria Pine Forest whose timber and sap constructed the ships that constructed the Portuguese empire. The Leiria was decimated by wildfires in 2017, and the interstitial titles — “Slash and Burn,” “Charred,” and so forth — make it clear {that a} blaze is coming for everybody. Smoke wafts by the palace whereas the conservative queen (Margarida Vila-Nova) putters round anxiously snuffing candles.

The symbolism is blunt, and the movie’s fashion, placing and extreme. Scenes are staged as exactly as painted tableaus, with good-looking shadows and gratuitous whippets. At one level, the prince stands on the dinner desk and delivers Greta Thunberg’s U.N. Climate Action Summit tackle straight to the digital camera — “The eyes of all future generations are upon you” — as if to persuade the viewers he kinda-sorta tried to get his mother and father to do one thing. Unmoved, his mom as a substitute fusses over a extra politically right title for the household’s 18th-century oil portrait, a mocking depiction of eight Black and Indigenous dwarfs who had been collected by Queen Maria I of Portugal (and of Brazil, the place she was known as Maria the Mad).

We already know that the prince gained’t develop as much as repair a lot. (Ingeniously, the cinematographer Rui Poças and the sound editor Nuno Carvalho evoke a desolate, airship-patrolled future utilizing solely a shadow and a loudspeaker.) But he retains that portrait, which conjures up reveries of his affair with Afonso. Their fleeting moments of pleasure make up the majority of the operating time. Rodrigues’s thoughts is on social upheaval, however his coronary heart is with Afonso’s lavishly lit stomach and the elements just under.

Rodrigues blows previous good style with an specific tête-à-tête within the scorched forest the place his courageous main males pant racial slurs into one another’s nether areas. It’s a tough watch, however Rodrigues balances this shocker with a scene of surprising loveliness: a dance quantity the place the pair’s slight stiffness makes their burst of emotional expression really feel tender and honest.

Will-o’-the-Wisp
Not rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes. In theaters.