Un prince (2023): A Contemporary Gay Pastoral
Un prince (2023) begins with a plant uprooted, gently lifted from the soil. As the shot suggests, this is a story of relocation. It follows sixteen-year old Pierre-Joseph as he extricates himself from an unhappy home and embraces the pleasures of agricultural and sexual fellowship with two much older men in rural France.
The director Pierre Creton, gardener and auteur, has given us a contemporary gay pastoral, part of a tradition that goes back through Richard Barnfield’s infamous 1594 poem The Affectionate Shepherd as far as Theocritus’s Idylls (3rd century BCE), aligning male homosexuality with the natural world. Creton’s protagonists fold labor and love into a single harmonious existence, forging caring, non-possessive relations with all of nature – including each other. It’s a vision that resonates with Walt Whitman’s exuberant paeans to male camaraderie, the easy entanglement of homosexual desire, friendship, and pedagogy:
To the young man, many / things to absorb, to engraft, / to develop, I teach, that / he be my eleve, / But if through him speed / not the blood of / friendship, hot / and red—If he be not / silently selected by lovers, / and do not silently select / lovers—of what use were / it for him to seek to / become eleve of mine? (Songs of Male Intimacy, XII)
This is a philosophy of freedom enacted in the film but never articulated, reflected upon, or interrogated. There is never any occasion on which to do so – for what is conspicuously absent from Pierre-Joseph’s bucolic existence, once he achieves it early in the film, is any sign of dissatisfaction. Everything is easy, everyone kind and content, progressing from simple pleasure to simple pleasure. There are no tensions, no jealousies, no arguments, no misunderstandings, no hurt feelings, no doubts, no disappointments, no moments of shame. There is barely space even for longing – sexual attraction, yes, but directly acknowledged and quickly gratified. The passions that maddened the poets are nowhere to be found. And one can’t help but feel that the film evades the difficult work of living with others, the ambivalence of loving. It forsakes the actual nature of human relationships for idyll.
Then again, pastoral is a romantic genre; and the film’s pronounced naturalism need not promise realism. In fact, despite many descriptions of his work as romanesque, Creton rejects the introspective psychology of the nineteenth-century novel in favor of the exteriority of the nouvelle roman. Thus, though Un prince depicts intimacy, it is not an intimate film. It is comprised of placid scenes, often medium and long shots showing characters engaged in simple tasks, with very little diegetic dialogue. These images are accompanied by voiceover narration from several characters, who take turns contributing to the story in the past tense, mostly through the staid recounting of events or the dispassionate registration of feelings (“I felt sexual attraction,” “I felt concern”). In this tranquil world, death, when it occurs, is met with indifference; bodies are filmed and never mourned or mentioned again. And as if to put us at even more of a remove, the narration is spoken by actors different than those depicting the characters onscreen.
This could not be further from the jaunty exultation of Whitman, let alone the low camp and melodrama that hold sway over contemporary queer taste. Creton is working in a more contemplative mode. This is a film that breathes. It is no surprise that he cites Marguerite Duras as a major influence. The work of Alain Resnais comes to mind too. These are the filmmakers who successfully translated the ethos of the nouvelle roman into a grammar of cinema. Consider L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Resnais, 1961) and India Song (Duras, 1975), in which rich, languorous shots are accompanied by voiceovers that try and fail to piece together the past; or films like Baxter, Vera Baxter (Duras, 1977) and Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retour (Resnais, 1963), in which characters negotiate their alienation and regret through stilted dialogue. Each of these films orbits elliptically around an opaque point of fixation, an unutterable enigma or trauma lodged in the memory.
Though not as haunted as these examples, Un prince has its own absent cause, an unseen force that orients the film. For the titular prince is not Pierre-Joseph but Kutta, a young adopted boy being raised in the same French village. “Uprooted” from the land of his birth, Kutta forms a kind of counterpoint to Pierre-Joseph’s trajectory. Although he does not appear until the end of the film, aspects of his life are intermittently narrated by his adoptive mother, an undercurrent coursing beneath the images. His quasi-mythical status is intensified when we hear that a teenaged Kutta, off on a long trip to the Hindu Kush in search of his roots, claims to have discovered some royal ancestry, whence he derives a newfound sense of nobility. His sudden appearance late in the film, decades later, marks a jarring, audacious break with Creton’s preceding naturalism and restraint. Using CGI, he pulls us across the threshold into the unconscious, condensing sexual desire and monstrous fantasy into a single image. The gambit pays off – the effect is both troubling and tantalizing, a credit to the film’s daring.
But what makes Un prince so compelling, so pleasurable to watch, is the innovative way that Creton transforms collaborative storytelling into a distinctive approach to cinema. The unique architecture of the film calls attention to the way we tell stories about ourselves, continually making and remaking the past by remembering it together. This is what’s most distinctive about the film: multiple narrators converge to tell their story, to collectively give meaning to the images that appear on the screen. The poly-vocality of the text mirrors the method of its production: as Creton has said, he worked with three close friends to write the film, assigning each the task of writing one character’s monologue before interweaving them.
We may catch a glimpse of this process in the final scene, as Un prince dissipates to a close. All the actors, including one whose character died, are shown sitting around a table at night, quietly cleaning mushrooms, illumined only by candlelight. It’s almost as though they’ve been telling the story to each other while working. Now the sounds of wildlife can be heard outside their door. One actor responds with an animal groan, another with a bird call. From the shelter of the cabin they reach out into the dark, speaking back to nature, trying to be understood.