One of the most beautiful films of 2022 begins a little over forty years in the future. Alfredo, the last king of Portugal, is dying in a stark white room. The only thing that can be heard from him is the occasional fart while a child plays with a Playmobil fire engine and a Playmobil fireman of color next to him. The king hasn’t had a crown for a long time, the wealth is gone, the money isn’t even enough for a decent state funeral.
Only memories remain for the dying. How he, as a young man, inspected the royal pine forest with his father. How later, when the forests were burning more and more, he recited Greta Thunberg’s famous speech to the royal parents: “You have stolen my dreams …” How he decided to become a firefighter in the face of the forest fires, although his mother was “Republican ” found. And how he, the white heir to the throne (Mauro Costa), makes the acquaintance of Afonso (André Cabral), his black instructor. The descendant of the colonized not only teaches the descendant of the colonizers how to put out fires, but also inspires physical love in them. From 2069 onwards, the rest is history.
The firefighters wear fetish clothing and sometimes nothing at all
“Irrlicht” is the title of this film by João Pedro Rodrigues, which is just over an hour long and whose queer and eclectic work is one of the most exciting things contemporary cinema has to offer. Especially since this parabolic film about a Portuguese prince and his ecologically erotic adventures absorbed the big issues of the present.
As the opening credits proclaim, the modern fairy tale is also a “musical fantasy”. In the royal forest, children sing about treating the trees well, planting them and tending them like friends. That is fresher, more optimistic and more efficient than the wooden doom prose of today’s adhesive protesters: If everyone would just listen to the film critics and see this film, limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would be easy.
Now the young prince not only gets an ecological conscience in the forest with the tall trunks and the juicy bark, but also a proper erection. Protecting trees means coveting them as well as bodies: that is the film’s central lesson. And once you’ve seen the bodies of the hot firefighters, with their sinewy muscles and stern faces on the training ground, accompanied by Mozart’s “Magic Flute”, you don’t want to see anything else at all. “Where, where, where, oh, where can I find you?” Tamino sings on the soundtrack, and as if the film and its plot were captured and enchanted by the aria, the answer can only be: Alfredo will find his Afonso right here . Between the red cars, a fire chief with the energy of a giant humming top and the fire extinguishers wearing fetish clothing in the locker room, and sometimes nothing at all.
Like all locations in the film, this enchanted guard is also a stage. For choreographed dances or scenes from “famous paintings” reenacted by the (half) naked men, for photos for their annual calendar. After Pier Paolo Pasolini (in “La Ricotta”) and Jean-Luc Godard (in “Passion”), nobody has transformed paintings into cinematic scenes as beautifully and ironically as Rodrigues. But in his pictorial art, art history is also captured and rewritten by the power of queer metamorphosis. “The Fireman’s Blowjob” by Caravaggio is probably as unknown to a larger audience as Francis Bacon’s “Mr. Fireman, Send Me a Dream”. Only Rubens’ “The Rape of Ganymede” is a real reference. There is no reason to invent anything: Zeus’ kidnapping of the beautiful young man has long been a gay primeval scene. Even Olympus was queer.
With the white Alfredo (Ganymede) and the black Afonso (Jupiter), Olympus is also decolonized by Rodrigues. While making love, Alfredo and Afonso invent names for their private parts that today might make some people nervous. Here a “Black Spear” of the “Cannibal” fights against the white “Imperialist”. The unexpected turning of the language of racism into a language of desire and tenderness is the most unexpected thing you will have seen in cinemas this year.
All this, seen from the king’s future deathbed, is nothing but memory, play and dream. The light on the screen is a will-o’-the-wisp. But it creates what our world lacks: new utopias, new myths, new hope.
Fogo-Fátuo, Portugal / France 2022 – director, script: João Pedro Rodrigues. With Mauro Costa, André Cabral. Salzgeber, 67 min. Theatrical release: 12/8/22.