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...
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...
- 5/11/2024
- by Manuel Betancourt
- Variety Film + TV
A Prince, the second narrative feature from French director Pierre Creton, is rather strange. There is a chorus of narrators for a quiet film. This movie is obsessed with sex, yet almost frighteningly unsexy. A Prince defies comprehensible storytelling and the laws of nature. And despite all of Creton’s formal efforts to make this film nearly unwatchable, A Prince is also quite beautiful.
As much as A Prince is about anything, it is about various residents in a rural French village. We open on Françoise (Manon Schaap), the woman in charge of the local trade school. Françoise speaks mostly about her adoptive son, Kutta, whose existence dangles enigmatically over the entire narrative. (Her narration is voiced by Françoise Lebru.) This isn’t really Françoise or Kutta’s story, though––at least the film doesn’t focus on them. It focuses primarily on Pierre-Jean (played mostly by Antoine Pirotte), who...
As much as A Prince is about anything, it is about various residents in a rural French village. We open on Françoise (Manon Schaap), the woman in charge of the local trade school. Françoise speaks mostly about her adoptive son, Kutta, whose existence dangles enigmatically over the entire narrative. (Her narration is voiced by Françoise Lebru.) This isn’t really Françoise or Kutta’s story, though––at least the film doesn’t focus on them. It focuses primarily on Pierre-Jean (played mostly by Antoine Pirotte), who...
- 9/29/2023
- by Lena Wilson
- The Film Stage
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