‘Fuego tuo’, a delicious ‘queer’, erotic and musical tale between a royal heir and a firefighter

by time news

when it premiered Frozen It didn’t take long for theories to emerge that Elsa, the protagonist with powers to freeze things, was Disney’s first lesbian princess. The fact that there was no prince charming to assist her, her attitude empowering her and that hymn called Let it go (which many read in code queer) They were enough reasons to feed the urban legend. Of course Disney did not say anything or confirm it in its sequel. At the moment, girls still do not have a princess that does not comply with the most normative canon of heterosexuality.

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Wildfire seems like the adult, provocative and lubricious answer to princess tales. What João Pedro Rodrigues, one of the most interesting filmmakers of recent years, does is build a dystopia to create an adult version of the stories that are told to children. This is not for the little ones. As in all Portuguese cinema there is a lot of eroticism, a lot of sex, some explicit scenes and a lot of political darts towards racism, colonialism, monarchies and climate change denialist policies.

A delightful musical fantasy queer which places his action in 2069, when the king of Portugal (who in real life has not had a monarchy for more than 100 years) dies and recalls how in 2011 he challenged the established order in the royal house saying that he wanted to be a firefighter. The young heir goes to train at the academy and there love arises with a black and provocative firefighter. A royal heir having sex in a forest, to the rhythm of a racist fado and turning the system upside down. As the character is told at one point, he “sounds very Republican.” If Disney princess movies have musical numbers, there are also here, and between the couple of lovers there is a sensual dance number in the middle of the fire academy that takes everything homoerotic out of a profession associated with masculinity, which the director turns in gay symbol.

João Pedro Rodrigues says that the idea of ​​imagining a future where the monarchy would continue to be present in his country came to him in a dentist’s waiting room. There were stacked all the gossip magazines and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the last kings were still on its pages. “I found it interesting and I thought, ‘but why are people interested in this, why are we excited to look at these things, see lives that are like fiction?’ I didn’t want it to be a movie against them, but it did make me think about how people want to present themselves to others. How people create their own fictions in order to connect with others. People create their own characters, which are a mix between reality and fantasy. In those magazines it was all fantasy, so I began to imagine a hypothetical royal family”.

It is not only them who create a mask, but for the director “we all have to create a character in some way to live in this society.” Something that has “intensified with all technology, which has completely changed the way we relate to each other.” The Royal Family of this monarchy is aware that they are being watched, everything is a little theater that they do for the audience. They speak to the viewer, they close the doors as if it were a curtain and display a classism and racism that is accentuated by the paintings that hang behind them, a legacy of the country’s colonial past that Rodrigues wanted to underline: “The entire colonial past was made by These people were the ones who ruled, and that painting represents all of this. It is a real painting and we reproduce it in real size. It is a kind of symbol of that Portuguese colonial past”.

Eroticism is not just showing a penis or a vagina, eroticism is in one hand, that can be the most erotic thing

Joao Pedro Rodrigues
Director of dinner

Portugal is a country linked to fire. Its history is marked by fires. The one in 1988 in Lisbon is still present in the memory of its citizens and its wounds are seen in the city. That is why it is not by chance that João Pedro Rodrigues writes a protagonist who is an iconoclastic prince with desires of a fireman. His dystopian fantasy has an environmental message, but also a criticism of a country that, despite being marked by the tragedy of the fires, continues to neglect forestry policies: “Yes, it is a way of flogging Portugal, but above all for the deforestation policy that is completely abandoned. There are many fires in the country, but it is still abandoned. Forests are only cared for by people who dedicate themselves to them with their own means”. His film, within its irony and bad mood, also wants to shout that things have to change: “We cannot continue doing the same thing we did after the industrial revolution. The world is going to end if things don’t change. I believe that we are living through things that have made consciousness change.”

Rodrigues’ cinema always has something in common, and that is that desire is present in everything. For him, “the desire to tell stories already has something to do with the desire for two people to meet.” “We socialize by wishing each other. Now we desire each other in a slightly strange and different way, through things that are not physical that I do not understand because I need that contact ”, he says and emphasizes that he never had an interest in shooting nudes or sex scenes. “I never wanted to make controversial films, but to be honest with myself and tell stories that are close to me at that moment in my life and always make films that are different from one another, not to get sick in a kind of comfortable way of making films. Question myself”.



Rejects the figure of the privacy coordinator. He has never had it and explains that the key is that he has always understood those scenes as something “choreographed” where everything is previously discussed with the actors. “The way I direct is very precise, gestures are important to me. There is an eroticism in the gesture itself. Eroticism is not just showing a penis or a vagina, eroticism is in one hand, that can be the most erotic thing, ”he ditch.

It is always labeled as a reference to cinema queer, and she remembers that when she started she didn’t think of making what “at that time was called gay and lesbian cinema”, but her stories are the ones that are close to her experience. “I am homosexual, so it seems natural to me to tell stories that are close to me and each film of mine represents the way in which I looked at the world at that moment in my life, so that is why I do not reject that label, because I also go to festivals cinema queer, but I do believe that cinema is a more general thing and that it is clumsy to put labels”, he says.

In this extremely free film, anything goes, even challenging the usual length of auteur films in recent cinema, where less than two hours seems an affront. Rodrigues has stopped the clock Wildfire in 67 minutes, and although he did not think of it as a “political act” he did do it as an “important act” to pull the ears “of auteur cinema that is often too long.” A duration that he believes has a clear reason: “I think the self-criticism was lost, and although it came naturally to me, I did want to make a short film, that would be like a will-o’-the-wisp, but also do it a bit against that complacency of some kind of cinema, not only auteur, but Hollywood”.

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