By Sarah Kurchak

Dir: João Pedro Rodrigues. Portugal/France, 2022. João Pedro Rodrigues’s latest work has rightfully earned the reputation of being “indescribable” or “unclassifiable” since it premiered at Cannes last May. (And not simply earned in the sense that it has come to be suited to those descriptions. Earned in the sense that it has received proper payment for its efforts.) It’s a work so uniquely suited to its medium that any attempts to summarize it an another are doomed to fall short.

But there are key moments and key concepts that a reviewer — or impassioned fan, or scandalized denouncer — can share that can give the uninitiated a general idea of what’s going. And whether or not it will be for them.

For one, the film begins in the year 2069, nice implications thoroughly intended, where a farting and dying King Alfredo descends into revery at the sight of a toy firefighter. For another, it immediately flashes back to 2011, where a younger Alfredo is half-creepily and half-charmingly surrounding by children singing about the importance of our friends, the trees. The loss of these trees a few years later inspires the prince to volunteer as a firefighter, which sends him on a journey of love, climate crisis, lust, class struggle, and duty. Which sends the audience on a journey through naked and homoerotic recreations of classic art, erotically charged CPR lessons, an extended modern dance sequence based on the steps for putting someone into the recovery position, and a sex scene where the lovers’ race and class disparity is thrust as forcefully into each other’s faces as their dicks are, with strong undercurrents of anti-colonialism and environmentalism.

Executed with a strange but heady mix of gleeful provocation and earnest investment in both the politics it explores and humanity it portrays, Will-o’-the-Wisp is both figuratively and literally ballsy. It might be too graphic for some tastes, too impassioned for others, and too strange for more. But if any of the above sounds appealing, it will probably be very much your thing. And the shock or confusion of others might add a touch to the enjoyment. 4/5 stars.