Will-o’-the-Wisp Overturns Political Precedent.
Pedro Rodrigues’s surrealist satire turns progressivism inside out.
In response to the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys recorded “Will-o-the-Wisp” to commemorate desire that can’t be legislated, that resists discipline. Few pop artists are so politically daring, but Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues’s newest work, also titled Will-o’-the-Wisp (Fogo-Fátuo), is even more outrageous.
Rodrigues structures several time-skipping vignettes about the passage of ungovernable political ideas that satirize…