‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’ Review: João Pedro Rodrigues’ Hot, Hilarious Queer Firefighter Fantasia
04.06.2022 - 20:59
/ variety.com
Guy Lodge Film CriticWhile the police force faces a massive task of image rehabilitation on screen, these are unexpectedly rich times at the movies for anyone with a firefighter fetish. After an unsurprisingly long wait for one film featuring a team of strapping laddermen in sensual dance formations, two have come along at once.
Taking the queer emergency service of “Titane” to a lighter, sweeter, more playful and more pornographic place, João Pedro Rodrigues’ delicious one-off “Will-o’-the-Wisp” lives up to the flighty, elusive promise of its title, teasing its viewers in more ways than one: with a titillating parade of bare male bodies in balletic motion, and with hints of thematic import beyond that leading erotic spectacle. Climate-change anxiety, republican politics and colonialist history are all woven into this shoestring-budgeted lo-fi sci-fi musical romance, despite a scant 67-minute runtime that scarcely has room for half its fizzing, flung-about ideas.
Still, Rodrigues doesn’t want to get too intellectual about it all: Rampantly horny and unapologetically silly, “Will-o’-the-Wisp” appeals to more primal desires and thought processes in its audience, even as it repurposes a Greta Thunberg speech or references the racially charged work of 18th-century Portuguese painter José Conrado Roza. Slighter and even less classifiable than Rodrigues’ 2016 breakthrough feature “The Ornithologist,” this Cannes Directors’ Fortnight premiere will nonetheless be hotly coveted by LGBTQ festival programmers and distributors, not least for the full-frontal fiesta that’ll prevent wider arthouse crossover.The decades-spanning but threadbare narrative begins, with what turns out to be a certain puerile appropriateness, in the year
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