The Prince has to be the strangest film I saw in 2019, a bizarre mix of social commentary and masculinity theory dropped into a queer fantasy that is at once more graphically violent and erotic than anything we should fantasize about. I didn't know how to handle viewing it in an auditorium filled with other viewers, and I don't know how to handle talking about it now. It's such a sensory film that almost begs to be seen in the dark with other people, even if it makes you feel uncomfortable.
Starting with an extreme close-up of a slashed throat, the camera zooms out gradually to reveal a young, handsome man on the floor surrounded by a pool of blood before panning up and seeing the murderer. We then cut to this murderer, Jaime, entering his prison cell. The entire movie takes place in his prison block in 1970s Chile, a tan-colored series of stone-walled, sand-floored rooms that look hot and miserable. The only times we're not caught in this claustrophobic warren are in Jaime's brief flashbacks that somewhat outline how and why he committed murder. That's it, though, and there's almost no exposition or fleshed-out characterization. Because, it would seem, it doesn't matter who these people are; they're so much meat.
What does matter is that these bodies are engaging in a lot of sex. Jaime, young pretty boy -- meaning lean, quiet, and with good hair -- is almost immediately nicknamed "the Prince" by his bunkmates including the "Stud" (Alfredo Castro), who seems to have the most power and influence among the criminals. That first day, Stud's young lover is kicked out of bed and forced to sleep on the floor so the Prince can become Stud's new partner. And so begins a saga of naked men constantly flirting, harassing, and fucking each other in prison, each hoping to climb the social ladder to gain influence and some modicum of comfort.
It's mostly smut, and often toeing the line of pornography if not gleefully leaping over it. A lot of the sex is thematically meaningless and serves -- perhaps not to titillate, usually, as half the virile characters are unlikable, doing terrible things, and are not conventionally attractive -- I suppose to normalize this kind of sexual congress-in-concourse. And while that may be a somewhat admirable goal, it gets woefully lost in translation. Though this kind of tale might have appealed to the 70s-era queer crowd in which it was written, a sort of escapist erotic fantasy of being locked in a space with dozens of other similarly-minded men, it feels icky at best in 2019. The film treats rape as an acceptable means of community-building, and suggests more than once that consent is a vague, ambiguous negotiation if it means anything at all. In 2019, a young man cast into a cell with horny older men or violent offenders should be grounds for a horror flick, not a plot trajectory toward self-realization and romance. Regardless of orientation, I should note, as the film has almost no differentiation between sexual orientation and situational sexual behavior; too, we're never sure what the political climate really is outside the prison, if they criminalize homosexuals or if all these men are just playing some sort of game in their cells.
Then again, while the constant flow of problematic sex scenes is a bit overwhelming, there are some really interesting elements of mise-en-scene here, as well as a few scenes that are funny, shocking, and otherwise make up a decent viewing experience. Case in point: one scene shows a horny Jaime attempting to... I guess masturbate on the dirt? My favorite was a flashback wherein Jaime attempts to have sex with an older woman called "Mom"; she teaches him how to have sex, but it's clearly not very fulfilling for either party, though it's hilarious for us. Then of course, there's the long hair, the bell-bottoms, and the hippie 70s vibe that pervade the cast and production design. It's fun enough, and I guess we can rack it up as a success that Jaime doesn't get killed by movie's end. In fact, he becomes the undisputed leader in Stud's place. Too bad we don't really know him, or care about the prison drama by this point.
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