‘A Prince’: Cannes Review

Dir: Pierre Creton. France. 2023. 82mins.

Surely one of the most kookily unclassifiable films ever to have screened in Director’s Fortnight – a Cannes sidebar not known for playing it safe – compact 80-minute curio A Prince is a bizarre tale of horticulture and gay sex in Normandy. With a cast of mostly non-professional actors, it’s the latest work by agricultural worker and outsider artist Pierre Creton (“one of the world’s great cineaste-peasants”, as the presenter put it before the debut screening) who has made numerous films of varying lengths. A Prince is unlikely to step far outside of the festival and ultra-niche streaming market but nevertheless is a film with a distinct, quiet voice, one that gently invites its audience into a rural world that is so far from the mainstream that it feels like another planet.

Charming, quirky, dramatically inert 

The story is told almost entirely via long passages of narrative voice-over that are ascribed to three separate characters and read out, not by the non-pro actors who play them, but by three French dramatic celebs: Mathieu Amalric, Françoise Lebrun and Grégory Gadebois. Lebrun also plays a tiny role in the film, delivering a dramatic masterclass in a dinner-table scene of ostentatiously loud cutlery-scraping that draws perhaps unwanted attention to the muted, undemonstrative performances of the rest of the cast.

At first, the story would seem to revolve around Kutta, the South Asian adopted son of Francoise, a mild-mannered Anglo-French plant-lover who runs a gardening school in the Normandy market town of Yvetot. Yet although Kutta is extensively talked about, we will meet him only right at the end – in a scene involving some crazy genital CGI work that, we suspect, must have eaten up half the film’s budget. Instead, it’s gardener Pierre-Joseph, played first by Antoine Pirotte and, in his older version, by the director himself, who is the story’s focus. As a horticultural student and apprentice, Pierre-Joseph meets two older men who begin as his teachers but soon become lovers – botany teacher Alberto and plant nursery owner Adrien.

In A Prince, deaths are signalled by shots in which actors lie immobile on the floor for a while. Voice-over confessions like “I immediately felt attracted to Adrien” are followed, soon after, by some awkwardly tender but decidedly unerotic scenes of naked lovemaking. It’s telling that one of the most passionate lines of actual dialogue in the film comes when a colleague of Pierre Joseph finds some small, nondescript flowers growing on a bank he’s weeding: “I found some quillworts!” he gushes. It is hoped that the viewer too will find their quillworts somewhere in Creton’s charming, quirky, dramatically inert new feature.

Filmed in boxy 16:9 ratio in a series of often painterly still shots, A Prince features a striking soundtrack – part Baroque courtly dance, part Doors-like instrumental – by Dutch lutenist Jozef van Wissem best-known for scoring Only Lovers Left Alive.