on the horizon
by
Douglas Messerli
Sebastián
Muñoz and Luis Barrales (screenplay), Sebastián Muñoz (director) El príncipe
(The Prince) / 2019
Winner
of the Queer Lion Prize at the Venice International Film Festival in 2019 the
Chilean Sebastián Muñoz-directed motion picture, El
príncipe (The Prince) is one of the best LGBTQ offerings I have seen
in some years.
The Hollywood Reporter reviewer
Boyd van Hoei did not at all agree with such a sentiment, writing:
A
pretty boy — or, to be more precise, an
angular
jawline and a head of lush curls in
search
of a personality — is thrown into a
dark
and dank prison in 1970 Chile in The
Prince
(El
principe). For most people, this
would
be a horror scenario, but this feature
is
such a work of homoerotic fantasy,
pilfering
liberally from sources ranging
from
Un Chant d’amour to Querelle and the
opera
omnia
of Jean-Daniel Cadinot,
that
the protagonist doesn’t mind being locked
away
with a bunch of handsy, well-endowed
inmates
for even one hot minute. Quite the
contrary,
as behind bars he’ll find plenty of
man-on-man
action, cute bell-bottoms and
perhaps
even the homosexual Holy Grail
decades
before the age of marriage equality:
love.
It’s
a rather mean review, bitchy and not even very correct in its easy put-downs.
First of all that young man who is imprisoned, Jaime (Juan Carlos Maldonado), upon his arrival in the menacing prison is
thrown into the cell headed by one of the most powerful men in this hell-hole,
“the Stallion” (Alfredo Castro), a somewhat elderly prisoner who recognizes
immediately that the authorities have spent some time in beating the new
prisoner before his arrival.
Moreover, Jaime, who is still very
confused about his sexuality, is not at all ready to jump into the bottom bunk
bed with the leader, but quickly recognizes, in the Stallion’s warning that his
cell requires two things, obedience and respect, particularly given the fact
that the man issuing the orders has just moved his previous lover, soon to be
described as “the abandoned” (Sebastian Ayala)—who unintentionally names his
replacement “The Prince”—to sleep on the floor obviously establishes the
situation. Either gracefully accept the elder’s nightly embraces and anal proddings
or sleep elsewhere, as the “abandoned” boy later discovers when he dares to
challenge the new tasks that the “Stallion” has assigned him. Where to you go
when you’ve been kicked out of even a prison cell?
Besides these facts, it is also clear
that Jaime is guilty of inexplicably murdering a man, who we later discover was
his very best friend, “the Gypsy” (Cesare Serra). Without fully realizing it, Jaime
had fallen in love with this off and on heterosexual and bisexual beauty, and,
more cognizant of the fact, he had become obsessed regarding his friend’s
heterosexual affairs. In one later flashback, Jaime watches, with rapt
voyeurism, his “friend” fucking a local girl, after which, upon their
departure, he wallows in the animal smell left in the dirt while masturbating
to the memory of the event.
Having experimented with an older woman,
and having demonstrated to his own friends—most of them younger and less
sexually experienced that even he is—Jaime is obviously still confused by the
series of emotions and events that have swept over him resulting in his
jealous-driven slitting of “the Gypsy’s” neck. And in his utter confusion the
young boy likely feels that he must suffer any consequences with which he is
faced.
I suspect van Hoei’s reference to the
arty French porn director Cadinot is simply a result that, unlike most such gay
films, Muñoz is thoroughly unafraid of portraying male nudity and homosexual activities
which—at least in the scenes from the uncut version of his film—showed the
figures actually producing sperm. In short this director recognizes what gay
sex really is and in what that activity results. I’m rather sorry that he was
either censored by others or himself in his deletion of Maldonado’s penis
actually producing what it was intended to.
And yes, the entire prison, including the
two handsome boys who sleep over him on the top level of the bunk, is a sort of
body-heaving testimony to what happens to highly testosterone producing men and
boys when they are locked away without women. Films featuring both men and
women shut away in clinks have hinted a same-sex activity since the earliest of
LGBTQ films.
Futhermore, I’d argue this is not truly a
film about gay sex, even if Muñoz is not afraid of portraying it. True, as a
kind of reward for the boy’s love and his own faith in The Prince, the Stallion
does eventually offer up his own arse to the Jaime’s cock. And those boys in
the upper bank, a bit like the gay figures in Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane,
do seem eternally interconnected at the groin. But there are a great many other
ways, in this prison, to torture one another than with open sex.
In another cell, devoted to the illicit
sale of drugs and other goods (coats, pants, cigarettes and food-stuffs), the
Stallion’s bête noire, "Che Pibe" (Gastón Pauls) uses even his cute
boyfriend Dany (Lucas Balmaceda) as a nearly unapproachable seducer to torment
The Prince, who, between Dany’s flirtations and the Stallion’s interceptions experiences
a kind of endless coitus interruptus worthy of Wagner’s Tristan and
Isolde.
And when that doesn’t work, “Che Pibe”
takes more direct methods to get the Stallion’s goat through the hanging death
of the elder’s lovely cat, Plato, taking down with it all higher logic as the
cat’s owner faces off with the prison vendor through a knife fight that
eventually ends in both their deaths.
In his new seat of power, Jaime now can
make the gesture of finally taking Dany into his bed to, at least, temporarily
protect him from evils that lie within these prison walls that is so dangerous
that even the guards refuse to intercede.
Finally, The Prince presents a
world that is not as much a sexual fantasy of those involved, as in Genet or
Fassbinder’s conceptions, but as a necessary world created, in particular, by
Jaime to serve as an alternative “other” to the fascist world of mayhem and
murder which, soon after his imprisonment was created by the rise to power of Salvador
Allende and, after Allende’s suicide, the takeover by General Augusto Pinochet.
Some days in the reign of Donald Trump, admittedly, I almost wish I myself
might be able to enter into a world of my own making. As flawed as that may be,
it might certainly be superior to the world in which we now are forced to live.
Early in the film, Jaime, as if already
knowing that whatever he might experience in this new environment will mean abandoning
everything in his past, he tells his only visitor (his father, his uncle?)
never to return. If he can already perceive that his new world can result in
fear and death, at least love, sex, and beauty—along with the respect upon
which the Stallion insists, may exist on the horizon.
By work’s end, the now powerful Prince,
it is clear, has learned even from his mentor’s mistakes. When another young
boy is deposited in his cell, he puts the newcomer on the floor, and for one
more night at least, keeps Dany in his bed.
Los
Angeles, August 17, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (August 2020).
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