Pedro Rodrigues’s surrealist satire turns progressivism inside out.
In response to the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys recorded “Will-o-the-Wisp” to commemorate desire that can’t be legislated, that resists discipline. Few pop artists are so politically daring, but Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues’s newest work, also titled Will-o’-the-Wisp (Fogo-Fátuo), is even more outrageous.
Rodrigues structures several time-skipping vignettes about the passage of ungovernable political ideas that satirize Portugal’s sexual, racial, religious history (from 2011 to 2069). Young aristocratic art student Alfredo (Mauro Costa), taught to appreciate the earth and his own pubescent body (he hides an erection during a lecture on the “verticality” of tree limbs), questions his family’s patrimony. Easily suggestible Alfredo falls for the climate-change agenda: “Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction,” he reads from his cellphone. “Thank God for the Paris agreement,” his conservative mother replies.
Alfredo commits himself to public service by defending the national forests as a volunteer fireman. He falls in love with black bombeiro Afonso (André Cabral), which begins his country’s profound Millennial revolution.
Alfredo has the airhead look of James Gray’s autobiographical teen hero in Armageddon Time, but when Costa dances with Cabral (a wily Grace Jones type), they show the self-driven physical authority seen in Matthew Bourne’s homocentric dance troupe — and their light/dark features complement each other. A rescue drill becomes a pas de deux, and their rhythmed movements (performed to a pop song and Mozart’s Magic Flute) show bodies and desires in sync.
Most socially conscious pop artists don’t think social changes through, but it is Rodrigues’s creative process to slip through time, in and out of realism and fantastic expectation, while being more politically forthright than an American liberal like Gray. Rodrigues trumps Gray’s petty, anti-Trump politics by treating whites and blacks, and men and women, as theatrical characters with shared compulsions that the Obergefell ruling didn’t address — but that Pet Shop Boys alluded to on “Will-o-the-Wisp.” PSB paid tribute to Christopher Isherwood’s diary account of illicit passion, using the folkloric phrase “will-o’-the-wisp” to describe an elusive or misleading phenomenon — bioluminescence — seen near marshes.
Rodrigues, being a cerebral fantasist (O Fantasma, Two Drifters, The Ornithologist), applies sensual and aesthetic analysis to superficial political issues and class behavior. Will-o’-the-Wisp shifts from the deathbed memories of an aged Alfredo to the social and sexual awakening of his youth, each transition going deeper into his political consciousness and then projecting Portugal’s moral, spiritual destiny. Rodrigues knows, as PSB’s song reminds us, that social transformation doesn’t necessarily change the human heart.
One hour is long enough for this arch experimentation, and sometimes Will-o’-the-Wisp gets awfully obscure. But no other film this year (or this decade) has been so visually witty or unconventionally bold. Covid repression has paralyzed most filmmakers, but Rodrigues’s rude artistry goes for unpredictable political provocation.
The film’s central image is an antique painting, The Wedding of Negro Rosa, done in a primitive style, depicting black midgets dressed in colonial garb; it’s Alfredo’s family heirloom. (Alfredo’s mother prefers renaming it “The Bridal Masquerade,” because, she says, “that other title is so outdated.) Rodrigues connects such political correctness to Alfredo’s training scenes in which pulchritudinous firemen tease his education by striking libidinous high-art poses — Caravaggio, Picabia, Francis Bacon — that mock Alfredo’s hidden passions.
The sequence peaks when Afonso hoists Alfredo onto his shoulders and they freeze, repeating Rubens’s Rape of Ganymede. Fassbinder, Derek Jarman, and Almodóvar never went so far, but puckish Rodrigues goes beyond even his compatriot, cinema’s ultra-serious artiste Pedro Costa — the Rembrandt of Lisbon’s ghetto — who specializes in European racial and cultural guilt.
Topping his previous bawdy extremes, Rodrigues dares a graphic duet in which Alfredo and Afonso recite racial fetishes that confess each man’s own self-image. This moment reveals subconscious racial and sexual ideology that eventually gets manifested in the film’s political-religious futuristic finale. (Churchgoers in the sacristy wear plastic Covid masks.) Rodrigues’s ultimate jest exposes the scandal and outrage that are hidden by post-Obergefell propriety. In Will-o’-the-Wisp, Rodrigues knowingly separates adult sexuality from trans grooming. He disentangles primal emotional need from political confusion. In a final sketch, progressive ideology meets bizarre cultural prophecy. Had the great surrealist Luis Buñuel ever made a gay movie, it would probably look like this.
