‘A Prince’ Review: A Literate Gay French Drama That Remains Much Too Oblique in the End
11.05.2024 - 04:21
/ variety.com
Manuel Betancourt The world of Pierre Creton’s “A Prince” is lush and verdant. His protagonist is a gardener’s apprentice whose penchant for taming and nurturing the wilderness around him is only matched by the latent eroticism he finds in various older men he comes to be involved with.
Mostly driven by voiceover narration meant to ground and disorient you in equal measure, “A Prince” is a study in the stories we keep from one another and the ones we tell ourselves. Creton’s vision of unruly desires in the French countryside is literate and oblique perhaps to a fault, its erotic sensibility feeling more intellectual than visceral.
The first line in Creton’s film, delivered in voiceover as images of gardening take up the screen, feels like a deferred promise: “The story really began when Kutta arrived,” we’re told by Françoise (who’ll be played by Manon Schaap but whose narration is voiced by Françoise Lebrun). You’d imagine then that this most “delicate child,” who’s been adopted by Françoise, would be the central figure in “A Prince.” And yet, audiences only get to meet Kutta as an adult more than an a hour into the film, once Creton flash-forwards four decades into the future and they find the filmmaker taking over the role of the one character who actually anchors the film: Pierre-Joseph, who’s played as a young man by Antoine Pirotte (and voiced by Grégory Gadebois).
As even that brief description of the cast ensemble of “A Prince” makes clear, Creton has chosen to fracture the trio of characters who, together, narrate this dreamlike tale. For in addition to hearing about Kutta from Françoise, and learning about what first drove Pierre-Joseph to become a gardener apprentice, we also hear from his botanist teacher,
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