“Will-o’-the-Wisp,” a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.

Warmly received at the recentFrameline LGBTQ+ film festival, it begins in 2069 as Alfredo, the king of Portugal, is on his deathbed. His mind drifts back to his youth, when as a brash teenage prince he criticizes his father’s climate policies, even recitingGreta Thunberg’sfamous“How dare you!” speechat the 2019 U.N. Climate Action Summit at the dinner table.

To the consternation of the royal family, Prince Alfredo (Mauro da Costa) rebels to become a firefighter, protecting sacred forests. Not mentioned in the film: In 2017, wildfires across central Portugal killed more than 100 people, which is obviously on Rodrigues’ mind.

At firefighter school, Alfredo’s climate idealism takes a back seat to an awakening he experiences among his fellow hunky trainees — several of whom, amusingly, like to re-create great works of classical art, a Caravaggio, for example, with their nude bodies.

Alfredo is especially drawn to Afonso (André Cabral), a Black firefighter. Rodrigues suggests that part of Alfredo’s attraction is atonement for the ruling family’s history of colonialism, his guilt cringingly revealing itself during a graphic sex scene — in a forest, of course — with Afonso.

“Will-o’-the-Wisp” has its moments, but this is another movie that thinks bringing up an issue is the same as excavating it. What would it have been like if the film had been longer than its 67 minutes — about half the running time of Rodrigues’ last film, thewonderful 2016 drama “The Ornithologist”?

Would there have been more delightful musical numbers? A vision of Portugal in 2069? A deeper dive into issues of climate change and colonial legacies?

We’ll never know.

Reach G. Allen Johnson:ajohnson@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @BRFilmsAllen