New York Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

PIERRE CRETON: A PRINCE/UN PRINCE (2023)


SCENE FROM A PRINCE

French art piece about a botanically-inspired gay love triangle

Lee Marshall in Screen Daily described A Prince as "surely one of the most kookily unclassifiable films ever to have screened in Director’s Fortnight". A Prince follows a horticultural student, Pierre-Joseph, whose sexual encounters with his botany teacher and mentors lead to a unusual hybrid tale of science, sex and meditation.

This film drops us into a dry, elegant, and nerdy upper middle class white French world of strange contradictions. the protagonist is attracted to posh meat-noshing hunters, as well as botanists, while disapproving of guns and hunting.

All the while events or tableaux are staged, but we rarely hear the amateur actors speaking. Instead there are voiceovers for them spoken by actors Mathieu Amalric, Françoise Lebrun and Grégory Gadebois It is as if those on screen they are "models," in the Bressonian sense.

This film is at once graphically sexual, verbally at least, and totally unsexy. There is a French country house atmosphere, and the food, the fires, and the dogs are appealing, the people not so much.

Gadebois lend their voices as narrators of the film’s poetic sequences. A Prince was penned by Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat and Vincent Barre.

The film features a striking soundtrack – part Baroque courtly dance, part Doors-like instrumental – by Dutch lutenist Jozef van Wissem best-known for scoring Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive.

I feel the influence of somebody like Eugène Green here, but the US distributor, Strand, felt some gay interest tie-in, which may be reflected in future LGBTQ festivals.

A Prince/Un prince, 82 mins., debuted at Cannes Directors' Fortnight, and won the SACD Prize from France’s Writers’ Guild for the best French-language film in the section. Screened as part of the New York Film Festival (NYFF61) where it was a Currents feature.