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‘The Little Mermaid’: 13 Differences Between the Original and Remake
It’s not just her voice Ariel loses in the new live-action adaptation. Plus, Sebastian has some updated advice in “Kiss the Girl.”This article contains spoilers about the live-action version of “The Little Mermaid.”Ariel, poor girl, already had no voice — and that was before the sea-witch added selective amnesia to the mix.It’s one of more than a dozen changes to the classic 1989 Disney animated film made for the new live-action adaptation, which is almost an hour longer. Among them: new songs; updated lyrics to “Kiss the Girl” and “Poor Unfortunate Souls”; and a personality for Prince Eric.Here are 13 ways the remake, directed by Rob Marshall, differs from the original.1. Ariel has locs.Halle Bailey, whose casting as Ariel led to a racist backlash, and the crew knew that death-by-flat-iron to recreate Ariel’s flowing mane of straight red hair was not the way to go. Instead, Bailey sported her natural locs, which were wrapped with strands of red hair.“As Black women our crowns are so special to us,” Bailey, who has worn locs since she was 5, told The New York Times. “Our hair is important to us in every single way, so I was really grateful that I was allowed to keep that essence of me.”2. Flounder looks like … a fish.When audiences got their first look at live-action Flounder in the trailer, there was a consensus: too real. “Before and after ozempic,” The Atlantic’s Sophie Gilbert tweeted with shots of Ariel’s anxious sidekick looking plump and colorful then and flat and scaly now.3. Prince Eric is a perk, not the prize.For Bailey’s Ariel, it’s the human world that piques her curiosity, not just the handsome prince (played by Jonah Hauer-King). Instead of giving up everything for him, Bailey told The Face, “it’s more about Ariel finding freedom for herself because of this world that she’s obsessed with.”Ariel (Halle Bailey) and Prince Eric (Jonah Hauer-King) have time to explore in the new version.Giles Keyte/Disney4. The prince is more than just a pretty face.Now he has a back story, too. “In the animated film — I’m sure the original creators would agree with this — it’s a wooden, classic prince character with not a lot going on,” Marshall told Entertainment Weekly. Now Eric’s trajectory is similar to Ariel’s. “He doesn’t feel like it’s where he fits in, his world,” Marshall said.5. Meet Prince Eric’s mother.Queen Selina (Noma Dumezweni) isn’t fond of the underwater realm and doesn’t understand her son’s obsession with oceanic exploration. The remake uses the added time to explore the divide between mermaids and humans.6. You might sympathize with King Triton.The overprotective ruler of the seas (Javier Bardem) also gets a more nuanced narrative, focused on why he hates humans so much. (His wife, Ariel’s mother, was killed by humans, a back story that fans of the prequel and TV series may know but that isn’t in the original.)7. Ariel and Eric share actual interests.Though their courtship still takes place in a blink-and-you-miss-it three days, the extra run time means they can do things other than make goo-goo eyes at each other, like poring over artifacts in his study and visiting a market.8. At times, you’ll feel like you’re watching “Hamilton.”Lin-Manuel Miranda — the “Hamilton” creator who’s also a big “Little Mermaid” fan — collaborated with the animated film’s composer, Alan Menken, on three new songs. (The original lyricist, Howard Ashman, died in 1991.)The new tunes are: “The Scuttlebutt,” a very Miranda-esque rap performed by Scuttle (Awkwafina) and Sebastian (Daveed Diggs) when they are trying to figure out whom Prince Eric will marry; a quintessentially Menken ballad for Prince Eric, “Wild Uncharted Waters”; and a Latin-infused number for Ariel, “For the First Time,” when she gets her legs.Ursula no longer urges Ariel to keep quiet in the tune “Poor Unfortunate Souls.”Disney9. Two beloved tunes sport updated lyrics.While “Kiss the Girl” originally suggested Eric do just that without asking Ariel first (“It don’t take a word, not a single word/Go on and kiss the girl”), Sebastian now advises him to “use your words, boy, and ask her.” Menken told Vanity Fair they wanted to avoid suggesting the prince “would, in any way, force himself” on Ariel.And in “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” while Ursula originally informs Ariel that “on land it’s much preferred/for ladies not to say a word” and that “it’s she who holds her tongue who gets a man,” the new version, sung by Melissa McCarthy, drops that verse entirely. (Because, Menken told Vanity Fair, some lines “might make young girls somehow feel that they shouldn’t speak out of turn, even though Ursula is clearly manipulating Ariel.”)10. “Les Poissons” is Les Poi-gone.As is Chef Louis, the French-accented cook who is out to serve up Sebastian.11. Ariel has selective amnesia regarding a certain kiss.Because simply losing her voice would have been too easy. Ursula’s spell now makes Ariel forget she must get Eric to kiss her.12. Get ready to be Team Grimsby.You might have forgotten he was even in the original, but Art Malik’s performance as the prince’s confidant will have you waving the Grimsby flag. He does everything he can to help Ariel and Eric get together.13. Ariel, not Eric, kills the sea-witch.That’s right: In 2023, women impale their own monsters. More
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Predawn Picket Lines Help Writers Disrupt Studio Productions
Workers from other unions have shown solidarity with the strikers, catching entertainment companies off guard.At 5 a.m. on a recent weekday, a lone figure paced back and forth outside the main entrance to the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles. Peter Chiarelli, a screenwriter, was walking the picket line.He held a sign reading “Thank You 399,” a message to the local branch of the Teamsters union, whose members he hoped would turn their trucks around instead of crossing his personal picket line to enter the lot, where Hulu was filming the series “Interior Chinatown.”“It’s passive-aggressive,” Mr. Chiarelli, who wrote the films “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Proposal,” said of his sentiment — sincere if the Teamsters turned back and sarcastic if they entered.Since the Hollywood writers’ strike began on May 2, Mr. Chiarelli and others like him have been waking before dawn to try to disrupt productions whose scripts had already been finished.“We need to shut down the pipeline,” he said of the shows in production.The practice, which was not used to any real effect when the writers last went on strike in 2007, initially caught some studio executives off guard. And many of them — as well as plenty of people in the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers — have been surprised that it has had some success.Mr. Chiarelli, taking a picture of a truck entering Fox Studios, hopes his presence will make Teamster drivers turn around.J. Emilio Flores for The New York TimesShowtime paused production on the sixth season of “The Chi” after writers gathered for two straight days outside the gates of the Chicago studio where it was filming. Apple TV’s “Loot” shut down after writers picketed a Los Angeles mansion where filming was taking place. The show’s star, Maya Rudolph, retreated to her trailer and was unwilling to return to set.Over 20 writers trekked from Los Angeles to Santa Clarita, Calif., to picket the FX drama “The Old Man,” starring Jeff Bridges. The overnight action kept Teamsters trucks inside the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch, Mr. Chiarelli said, and crews had difficulty working. The show soon suspended production.A Lionsgate comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogen, with Aziz Ansari making his debut as a movie director, shut down last week after just two and a half days of filming in locations around Los Angeles after loud, shouting writers picketed all three of its sets.“While we won’t discuss the specifics of our strategy, we’re applying pressure on the companies by disrupting production wherever it takes place,” a Writers Guild of America spokesman said in a statement.Eric Haywood, a veteran writer who is on the union’s negotiating committee, put it more plainly. “If your movie or TV show is still shooting and we haven’t shut it down yet, sit tight,” he wrote on social media last weekend. “We’ll get around to you.”A representative for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, declined to comment.Both sides have privately said a much greater sense of solidarity among unions than during the last writers’ strike has made it harder for workers from other unions to cross picket lines. Productions are also more geographically widespread than they were 15 years ago. In addition to fortified Los Angeles soundstages, writers have picketed locations in the New Jersey suburbs, New York’s Westchester County and Chicago. And social media has provided a way to alert writers to quickly get to specific picket lines.Each day, the writers send out calls for “rapid response teams” when they learn about a production’s call time and location.“Breaking: they’re shooting on Sunday … we’re picketing on Sunday,” a writer posted on Twitter, asking people to get together immediately in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn to disrupt a production. “Please amplify.”“I think everybody is getting behind us because they see that if we all stick together, we can make some real achievements,” said Mike Royce (“One Day at a Time”), who has joined Mr. Chiarelli in his some of his predawn pickets.“The Old Man,” starring Jeff Bridges, is one of several productions that stopped filming because of picketing by writers.Prashant Gupta/FXThe writers have disrupted other events as well. Netflix canceled a major in-person presentation for advertisers in New York amid concerns about demonstrations. The streaming company also canceled an appearance by Ted Sarandos, one of its co-chief executives, who was to be honored at the prestigious PEN America Literary Gala. A Boston University commencement address by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, was interrupted by boos and chants of “Pay your writers!” from demonstrators and students.While the makeshift picket lines have disrupted individual productions, it’s not clear that they’ve had much effect on the strike itself. Negotiations haven’t resumed since they broke down on May 1, and the industry is bracing for the possibility that the strike could last for months.The writers contend that their wages have stagnated even though the major Hollywood studios have invested billions of dollars in recent years to build out their streaming services. The guild has described the dispute in stark terms, saying the “survival of writing as a profession is at stake.”But production shutdowns are affecting not only the studios. Crews and other workers — like drivers, set designers, caterers — lose paychecks. And if the shutdowns accumulate and more people are unable to work, some wonder whether the writers will begin to erode the current good will from other workers.Lindsay Dougherty is the lead organizer of Local 399, the Teamsters’ Los Angeles division, which represents more than 6,000 movie workers, from the truck drivers the writers are trying to turn away to casting directors, location managers and animal trainers. A second-generation Teamster, Ms. Dougherty is one of the union’s few female leaders. Her copious tattoos, including one of the former Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, and her frequently profane speech have made her a bit of a celebrity to the writers during the strike.And she said the solidarity with the writers remained strong.“I think collectively, we’re all on the same page in that streaming has dramatically changed the industry,” Ms. Dougherty said in an interview. “And these tech companies that we’re bargaining with, during the last writers’ strike — Amazon, Apple, Netflix — they weren’t even part of the conversation.”Asked if the Teamsters were tipping off the writers about the timing and location of productions, she demurred.“The Writers Guild is getting tips from all sorts of different places — whether it’s members that are working on the crew, or from film permits, they obviously have social media groups and emails set up to send tips and information,” she said.In the meantime, Mr. Chiarelli keeps pacing outside Fox Studios each day, hoping he can turn some trucks around. Some days he gets results. On a recent morning he was joined by several other writers, and five trucks turned away, he said. During an overnight picket at Fox, a trailer carrying fake police cars destined for the shoot turned tail at 2 a.m.Other days, the picket line is much more sparse, especially if a tip takes a group to a different location.He and Mr. Royce talked fondly about their second day out in the darkness. It was pouring rain when two large trucks pulled into the turn lane, blinkers on, ready to enter the lot. Then they saw the writers. The trucks pulled to the side of the road, waited about 10 minutes, then turned around.They “blew past the entrance, honked their horns and waved at us,” Mr. Royce said. “It was thrilling.”Added Mr. Chiarelli, “I’ve been chasing that high ever since.” More
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Quentin Tarantino Teases Final Movie at Cannes Film Festival
He played coy about the forthcoming “The Movie Critic” in a wide-ranging chat but may have dropped one major hint.Before introducing one of his favorite movies at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, Quentin Tarantino had this instruction for the audience.“If you want to scream at a shotgun blast, scream at a shotgun blast,” he said, imploring the viewers to be as “un-French” as possible in their reactions. “Let’s bring a little bit of American grindhouse here at Cannes!”That’s how he set up the 1977 revenge flick “Rolling Thunder” — a movie so foundational to Tarantino, with its third act of cathartic, gun-blast violence, that it’s rumored he will restage it in some fashion for his forthcoming final film, “The Movie Critic.” At least, that’s according to a co-writer of “Rolling Thunder,” Paul Schrader, who revealed that tantalizing tidbit in a recent interview with IndieWire. Though Tarantino himself has said very little about “The Movie Critic,” his film selection on Thursday may have confirmed Schrader’s tease.In the hourlong chat that followed the screening, Tarantino, 60, mostly discussed titles mentioned in his recent book of essays, “Cinema Speculation.” (He was at the festival to give a talk but wanted to present a film as well.)He began with an extended riff on “Rolling Thunder,” which stars William Devane as a Vietnam veteran pursuing the criminals who killed his family: Tarantino noted that though he loves the film, Schrader felt it departed too much from his original script.“He doesn’t recognize the movie any more than I recognize Oliver Stone’s version of ‘Natural Born Killers,’” Tarantino said, citing one of the few films he wrote but didn’t direct. Tarantino has disavowed Stone’s take on his material, but he said that Johnny Cash once told him that he was a big fan of the 1994 film, which starred Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.“I didn’t tell him he was wrong,” Tarantino said.What is it about films like “Rolling Thunder” that he responds to? “Look, I like violent movies,” Tarantino said. “Some people like musicals, some people like slapstick comedy, I like violent movies. I think it’s a very cinematic thing to do.”Asked if he had ever watched a film where the violence wasn’t justified, Tarantino at first appeared so stumped that the audience chuckled. Eventually, he cited “Patriot Games,” the 1992 Harrison Ford thriller. Tarantino initially found the villain’s motivations so relatable, he said, that he rebelled when the character took a late swerve into psychopathic violence: “Just the fact that the villain was this much understandable, that was too much as far as the filmmakers were concerned. So they had to make him crazy. That’s what I got morally offended by.”When it comes to depictions of violence, Tarantino said there was only one line he wasn’t willing to cross. “I have this big thing about killing animals in movies,” he said to applause. “But I mean insects, too! Unless I’m paying to see some weird bizarro documentary, I’m not paying to see real death. Part of the way this all works is that it’s make-believe — that’s why I can stand by the violent scenes.”Tarantino has said his forthcoming 10th film will be his last (owing to his belief that directors have a finite amount of good films in them and ought to quit while they’re ahead), and that he hopes that more books like “Cinema Speculation” will follow once he hangs up his director’s cap. Is that why he has made a movie critic the title character of his final feature?“Well, that’s a long story,” he said at the end of his chat. “I can’t tell you guys until you see the movie!”Still, he offered a tease: “I’m tempted to do some of the character’s monologues right now,” he said. “You guys would get a kick out of it. Maybe if there was less video cameras.” More
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‘You Hurt My Feelings’ Review: She Can’t Handle the Truth
The director Nicole Holofcener’s characters are known for their brazen honesty. But it’s dishonesty that drives her new film, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.I love a complete sentence for a title. Even better: a complete-sentence title that also describes a filmmaker’s chief concern. “You Hurt My Feelings” sums up the Nicole Holofcener experience: funny in its wounded bluntness.It’s the seventh comedy she’s written and directed since 1996. With more emotional harmony and generosity than her other films, it takes the same stock of ways we can bruise each other, partners, strangers, kids. Her characters — comfortable New Yorkers and Angelenos — tend to lash out; their preferred approach to honesty is brazenness. The new movie embraces more constructive impulses. It’s dishonesty that interests her here, the mild kind that one character calls, in his defense, “white lies” — what you tell a person because the truth would just be a whole thing.The white liar is Don (Tobias Menzies). For two years, he’s been reading draft after draft of a novel his wife, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has been working on and telling her how good they are. The movie’s about what happens after she overhears him, at a Manhattan sporting goods store, telling her sister’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), that, actually, he doesn’t like the book, but the truth would kill her. He’s not wrong. She’s a weepy wreck for two scenes with the sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), convinced that now she’ll never be able to trust Don. But Holofcener is drawn more to the process of healing than she is to the wielding of hurt.Twenty minutes pass before that sporting goods store encounter. By that point the movie’s already shown us what Beth’s and Don’s lives are like, together and apart. They’ve got the sort of sturdy, affectionate, unselfconsciously idiosyncratic bond that means they’d just as soon share an ice cream cone as a bed. One thing that’s probably kept the marriage firm has been saying “I love this” and “it’s great,” when it’s not. White lies are like Advil for certain relationships; they keep the inflammation down. In the aftermath of Don’s bombshell, up go her quills. She starts sleeping on the sofa, ignoring him and distancing herself, and he’s confused. Then one evening, in front of Sarah and Mark and a sad bowl of underdressed salad, she tells him that she heard what he said. Then the movie does what too few American marriage comedies do: adjudicate the disappointment. It becomes about the truths that flow from that unburdening.Holofcener makes the smart decision to put Beth and Don in the constructive honesty business. She teaches writing to adults. He’s a therapist. I don’t think either of them loves what they do, but it looks like they make a good living at it. We get to watch her respond to her four students’ story ideas and, in one case, to an actual piece, and to observe him with a handful of patients. Holofcener’s films are fleet. Rarely do they exceed the 92-minute mark. But their social resonance springs from a marvel of proficiency.Every relationship Holofcener gives us — and just about every scene — explores some type of candor, some act of leveling: between Don and Beth; Beth and Sarah; Beth and Don and their foggy 23-year-old son (Owen Teague); Beth and her agent (LaTanya Richardson Jackson); Beth, Sarah and their mother (Jeannie Berlin), a widower who lives under her daughters’ skin; a pair of married lesbians with whom a tipsy Beth instigates an argument; Sarah, who appears to be an interior decorator, and the particularly particular client displeased with her taste in lighting. Plus everything with the students, the patients and Mark, whose acting career is in neutral. I didn’t mention Beth’s pretty successful memoir about her (verbally) abusive father, whose title you need to hear stumble out of Louis-Dreyfus’s mouth. But Holofcener could have used it for just about any one of her movies.Her targets, themes and tropes haven’t changed. It’s still narcissism and personal vanity (Don wants an eye job). It’s still the emotional disturbances of moneyed, dissatisfied liberals who need Black people and the poor to make sense of themselves as successfully good white folks. (Beth and Sarah do complacent volunteer work at a church’s surprisingly stingy clothing giveaway.) No American director’s more committed to exposing the smugness and self-aggrandizement of bourgeois urbanites.The cantankerous, obnoxious and cruel characters are still here, too. Most of them are just sitting on Don’s couch. The harshest of them is a couple played by (the actually married) David Cross and Amber Tamblyn. These two hate each other, and they squirt Don with their bile. Now, in a Holofcener film, we can study intense marital dysfunction from the compartmental vantage of a mental health professional, somebody who in his personal life uses a completely different approach to communicating with his wife. Menzies’ good-natured neutrality here perfectly serves both Don the shrink and Don the husband.Holofcener continues, nonetheless, to be more interested in character than in great acting. That makes sense since she needs her casts to approximate some version of us or people we recognize. Which is to say that everybody here is life-size. Louis-Dreyfus knows how to find real pathos in a hurry. She’s a pro at putting across Holofcener’s casually cranky snobbery (about new coffee shops, clean menus and $19,000 benches). Beth’s in the middle of saying something racist about the weed shop where her son works when the movie’s least believable incident goes down.Part of me thought I wanted something wilder from Holofcener, comedy that felt like crisis. The way some of her earlier films do; the way it does in the novels of Nell Zink and Patricia Lockwood. But her studies of ego and frailty are closer to Albert Brooks and Larry David: about breaches of etiquette rather then psychological breaks. Still, this feels like a quiet breakthrough for her. She’s put the emotional dynamite away (her steadiest supplier of TNT, Catherine Keener, isn’t here). Instead, this is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.You Hurt My FeelingsRated R for language (the painfully honest kind). Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘The Wind & the Reckoning’ Review: A Hawaiian Story of Resistance
A docudrama follows a family fighting to stay together and avoid exile to a leprosy colony, but fails to carry an emotional punch.It’s a story as old as the United States itself: American business interests drive white men onto Indigenous lands, where they displace and impose their own rule of law on an otherwise sovereign group of people. The docudrama “The Wind & The Reckoning,” directed by David L. Cunningham, tells the true story of a group of Native Hawaiians who resisted the government-mandated exile implemented to address a leprosy outbreak in Hawaii in the late 1800s. A provisional government, put in place after American businessmen overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani and dissolved the Kingdom of Hawai’i, forced Natives suspected of infection onto the island of Moloka’i. There, marriages were no longer recognized, and thousands died and were buried in unmarked graves.“The Wind & The Reckoning” follows Pi’ilani (Lindsay Marie Anuhea Watson), her husband, Ko’olau (Jason Scott Lee), and their son, Kalei (Kahiau Perreira), as they fight to stay together after the latter two are infected. As Pi’ilani, who never contracts leprosy, says in a voice-over, “No man, no government could break the bonds of marriage and family.”Sadly, the film does not carry the emotional punch that the subject matter warrants. “The Wind & The Reckoning” is centered on gunfights between Ko’olau and the soldiers, and one would have liked to get a sense of the broader world outside of this battle — the people in the leprosy colony, for instance, or the political turmoil of the time. The story feels too self-contained and the characters too one-note, which, despite the merits of the subject, makes it hard to feel immersed in their world.The Wind & the ReckoningNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘We Might as Well Be Dead’ Review: Housing by Neighborhood Watch
A single mother fights for her place in a dystopian high rise in this unfocused satire.A housing board rules over a dystopia in the off-kilter satire “We Might as Well Be Dead.” The film follows Anna (Ioana Iacob), a single mother and security guard whose role in her high rise home is to interview and introduce candidates for new housing. The film doesn’t specify what kind of apocalypse has made residency in the high rise so prestigious, but new applicants treat their adjudication as a life or death matter, begging on their hands and knees for sanctuary.Anna wasn’t born in the community she now calls both home and employer. She isn’t a perfect citizen by the board’s standards. She’s a single mother and her daughter, Iris (Pola Geiger), has started to show signs of buckling under the closed society’s pressure, hiding full time in the apartment bathroom. Anna’s tenuous position in the building is threatened further when a neighbor’s dog goes missing, and an atmosphere of paranoia settles over the community. Anna tries to convince her neighbors that the dog’s absence is an accident rather than a conspiracy, but her efforts are met with increasing frenzy, and the mob soon begins to turn on her.The director, Natalia Sinelnikova, draws out a sense of dread through canted angles and harsh lighting. The camera is often placed below the faces of the actors, peering up at them from perspectives that seem off-kilter. When the camera pulls back, the inhabitants of the high rise seem crowded into doorways and long dwindling halls. The images are artfully crafted, but the narrative lacks momentum. The film flirts with themes of surveillance and immigrant anxieties, but its allegoric ambitions are continually thwarted by yet another neighborly grievance.We Might as Well Be DeadNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’ Review: A Prince Throws Off His Privilege
Or, at least, he kinda-sorta tries to rebel in this romantic, futuristic fable from the Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues.“Will-o’-the-Wisp,” an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy dress, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everyone, particularly the powerful and those holding out hope that the powerful will save the planet.Portugal booted its monarchy in 1910, but in this alternate timeline, the royals still reign. When the do-gooder prince, Alfredo (Mauro Costa), shocks his family by becoming a firefighter, Rodrigues drops him into an eroticized firehouse for a beefcake feast, concocting a calendar shoot to bend the fighters into, um, suggestive poses. Later, the director assembles a slide show of genitalia which the waify blond prince and his working-class Black lover, Afonso (André Cabral), liken to various climates. (Petrified forest, barren grassland — you won’t have to strain your imagination to see the resemblance.)The movie, co-written by Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata and Paulo Lopes Graça, opens with Alfredo on his deathbed in 2069 — the film’s most subtle sexual reference. Then it flashes back to the prince’s youth, where he’s escorted through ancient pines by the king (Miguel Loureiro). Some viewers might recognize the woods as the Leiria Pine Forest whose timber and sap built the ships that built the Portuguese empire. The Leiria was decimated by wildfires in 2017, and the interstitial titles — “Slash and Burn,” “Charred,” and so on — make it clear that a blaze is coming for everyone. Smoke wafts through the palace while the conservative queen (Margarida Vila-Nova) putters around anxiously snuffing candles.The symbolism is blunt, and the film’s style, striking and severe. Scenes are staged as precisely as painted tableaus, with handsome shadows and gratuitous whippets. At one point, the prince stands at the dinner table and delivers Greta Thunberg’s U.N. Climate Action Summit address straight to the camera — “The eyes of all future generations are upon you” — as though to convince the audience he kinda-sorta tried to get his parents to do something. Unmoved, his mother instead fusses over a more politically correct title for the family’s 18th-century oil portrait, a mocking depiction of eight Black and Indigenous dwarfs who were collected by Queen Maria I of Portugal (and of Brazil, where she was called Maria the Mad).We already know that the prince won’t grow up to fix much. (Ingeniously, the cinematographer Rui Poças and the sound editor Nuno Carvalho evoke a desolate, airship-patrolled future using only a shadow and a loudspeaker.) But he keeps that portrait, which inspires reveries of his affair with Afonso. Their fleeting moments of joy make up the bulk of the running time. Rodrigues’s mind is on social upheaval, but his heart is with Afonso’s lavishly lit abdomen and the parts just below.Rodrigues blows past good taste with an explicit tête-à-tête in the scorched forest where his brave leading men pant racial slurs into each other’s nether regions. It’s a rough watch, but Rodrigues balances this shocker with a scene of shocking loveliness: a dance number where the pair’s slight stiffness makes their burst of emotional expression feel tender and sincere.Will-o’-the-WispNot rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes. In theaters. More
