A crown prince who dreams of being a fireman to fight climate change and an instructor with the body of a Greek statue who teaches him how to handle a fire hose. A Portuguese monarchy, revived and yet dying, framed in a dystopian future (2069, the centenary of the director’s birth) that looks back on a recent past (2011). A Brechtian musical, an erotic comedy, a post-colonial satire, and an ecological fantasy. If one were to describe "The Fire Within" by piling up definitions, we would end up exhausting the labels in the cinematic dictionary without ever capturing its elusive, chameleonic essence. Because this film, compressed into 67 minutes of pure, dazzling audacity, is not a sum of its parts, but a cinematic chimera, a filmic object as dense as a Foucault essay and yet as light and shameless as a Tom of Finland bacchanal.

Rodrigues, long a chronicler of a marginal Portugal, poised between the sacred and the profane, between fado and techno, here performs an act of cultural syncretism that is nothing short of miraculous. He abandons the darker, more phantasmagorical drifts of works like O Fantasma to embrace an aesthetic that seems to fuse the pop irreverence of an early Almodóvar with the painterly composure of a Peter Greenaway. The narrative, as slender as a wisp of smoke, is a pretext, a canvas on which to embroider a series of tableaux vivants that converse with centuries of art history and thought. The body, as always in Rodrigues’s cinema, is the battlefield and the temple of desire. But here, more than ever, it also becomes a political and historical text. The fire station, an archetype of heteronormative, communal masculinity, is transformed into a homoerotic Parnassus where the sweaty, muscular bodies of the firefighters are not merely objects of desire for the young Prince Alfredo, but become living sculptures, carnal replicas of an aesthetic canon that runs from Phidias to Michelangelo, by way of the martyred saints of the Renaissance.

The sequence in which Alfredo and his beloved Afonso, along with their comrades, recreate famous thematic paintings with their naked bodies—a brilliant reinterpretation of Raphael’s The Fire in the Borgo standing out among them—is the film's beating heart. This is no mere exercise in citational style, no self-serving intellectual conceit. It is a powerfully poetic statement of intent. Rodrigues freezes the action into plastic poses that stop time, transforming sex and desire into art, and art into a commentary on the vulnerability and power of the human body. In these moments, Rodrigues’ cinema approaches that of Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio, where History is short-circuited by queer desire, revealing the homoerotic tensions latent beneath the patina of sacred painting. But where Jarman was punk and enraged, Rodrigues is ironic and melancholic, closer to a Pasolini who had read Judith Butler and decided to shoot Teorema as a pop operetta.

The relationship between Alfredo, a white prince and heir to a phantom crown, and Afonso, a Black fireman descended from immigrants, is the lens through which Rodrigues lays bare the unresolved contradictions of contemporary Portugal. The love between them is never portrayed as a simple inter-class and interracial fairytale. It is a complex dialogue—at times clumsy, often silent—on the weight of colonial history. When the royal family, mummified in its absurd traditions, questions Afonso about his origins, the scene vibrates with a tension that unmasks the latent paternalism of a nation that has yet to fully reckon with its past. The film offers no easy solutions, but instead embodies this dialectic in the very bodies of its protagonists: Alfredo’s disciplined, noble body and Afonso’s statuesque, proletarian one attract and study one another, in a ballet that is as much political as it is erotic.

All of this is shot through with a surreal humour and musical numbers that erupt unexpectedly, shattering any illusion of realism. We cut from a choreography of firefighters miming the act of extinguishing a blaze to a "fado do caralho" (the fado of the cock), sung with funereal seriousness, which is at once a phallic hymn and an iconoclastic deconstruction of the most sacred of Portuguese musical genres. This desecrating playfulness recalls the intellectual anarchy of Guy Maddin, his ability to blend a pastiche of old film genres with a deep and heartfelt reflection on national identity. But Rodrigues’s horizon is broader. The framing device, with an elderly King Alfredo on his deathbed in 2069 recalling his youth, tinges the entire work with a poignant nostalgia for a future that may never arrive. The flames the young prince wanted to tame are not only those of forest fires—an all-too-clear metaphor for the climate crisis—but also those of passion and political revolution, fires that time and compromise have inevitably extinguished.

"The Fire Within" is a film that burns fast and leaves a bright, persistent trail in its wake. It is a work that demands the viewer abandon traditional categories and surrender to a flow of images, sounds, and ideas that layer upon one another with impressive density. It is an environmentalist pamphlet disguised as an erotic comedy, a post-colonial essay in the form of a musical, a reflection on the end of Europe that has the audacity to be fun and sexy. Like a true ‘fuoco fatuo’—the flicker of light produced by the decomposition of organic matter—Rodrigues’s film is born from the decomposition of genres, ideologies, and history, and from it draws a light as ephemeral as it is dazzling. This is a cinema that does not fear the ridiculous, and for that very reason, it achieves the sublime, proving that the sharpest intelligence can happily coexist with the most unbridled joy and the most shameless provocation. A small, incandescent masterpiece.