WATCH: Homoerotic firefighter calendars inspired this surreal musical romance
Will-O’-The-Wisp isn’t your average fairytale. But it exists in a magical, queer, sexually charged world all its own—that’s our kind of fairytale!Will-O’-The-Wisp is the story of Alfredo (Mauro Costa), a young prince who loves the environment so much that he decides to become a fireman so that he can help protect it.But once he begins his training, he falls in love with something else entirely: A Man—specifically his handsome fire house instructor, Afonso (André Cabral).
Their steamy affair plays out over sexually charged chest compression training, locker room wrestling, and balletic dance routines.And for some reason it’s all set in the future, the year 2069?
Which, as the director puts it, is an “allusion to 1969, the erotic year!”Look, writing this all out, we realize it may sound a little….
unhinged, but once you get a first look at Will-O’-The-Wisp, it somehow all makes sense. This is a movie that makes its own rules, creating a highly evocative fantasy world—one which largely plays out in the confines of a fire house locker room.This is all by design for provocative filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues (The Ornithologist), who says the look of the movie was inspired both by homoerotic firefighter calendars and classical Baroque painters.“I played with the reference to the firefighters’ calendar in which they are photographed scantily dressed,” the writer-director shares in a press statement. “I took it even further by asking the actors to pose as if for a calendar but also to recreate the postures of characters that would be found in classic paintings.
