At the beginning of Pierre Creton’s A Prince, British botanist Mark Brown delivers a talk to a group of French horticultural students about his real-life plans to recreate a primitive forest in his garden in Normandy. Beneath a flow chart listing the plants he seeks to bed into his realm, Brown opts for poetic allegory. Rather than just a natural science, gardening should be about the visualisation of something intangible, “just like a musical score,” he says.
In more ways than one, Creton has indeed achieved something along those lines with what he describes in the press notes as his first work of fiction. Set largely among flower farmers and beekeepers in Pays de Caux, a region in northern France where the art school graduate has lived and worked both as a farmer and filmmaker for the past three decades, A Prince teases mesmerising sensuality out of its horticultural protagonists. Revolving around the slow rite of passage of a young gardener as he grapples with his professional calling and his sexual desires, the film offers enigmatic drama delivered through elliptical storytelling, mixed with sporadic dollops of rapturous black humour.
A veteran roundly celebrated among French cinephiles for his singular dedication to his milieu and métier – most of his films are set in Pays de Caux, and all of them cast a sympathetic eye on the largely invisible agricultural communities in provincial France – Creton will surely find a bigger audience after the film’s bow in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes this year. Featuring Françoise Lebrun (The Mother and the Whore, India Song) in both an on-screen role and as one of the film’s co-narrators – Mathieu Amalric is another A-lister who contributed a voiceover – A Prince should secure a slightly more regal welcome from festival programmers than Creton’s previous films.
The film’s title refers to Kutta, an Indian boy whom the French horticulturalist Françoise Brown (played on-screen by Manoon Schaap) brought to France as her own; off-screen, she explains in voiceovers (delivered by Lebrun) about her adopted son’s difficulties growing up in a strange land. But Kutta is a mysterious figure who never really appears in the film until the final reel; instead, the protagonist is Pierre-Joseph (Antoine Pirotte), a young apprentice whom François has taken under her wing at her school.
With his blank stare and slow movements, Pierre-Joseph is considered initially by many as a “half-wit”, according to Françoise. But then we get to see the young man’s version of his life: accompanied by a voiceover from Grégory Gademois, his early life plays out, while we hear about his considered choice of choosing botany over butchery, and his anguish in living with a mother with a penchant for pulp novels, strong alcohol and crazed conversations with an invisible confidante.
Not that we get to see all this in action, however. As Gademois enunciates the mother’s litany of destructive behaviour, we see the old woman (played on-screen by Lebrun) spending a comical amount of time finishing her dinner, or refusing to serve customers at her gun store while downing tumblers of whisky. This disconnect between what we see and what we’re told extends to nearly all the voiceovers, including that of Françoise, Pierre-Joseph, and his elderly teacher Alberto (played by Creton’s longtime screenwriting collaborator Vincent Barré, with his internal narration by Amalric).
Creton’s play with image and sound renders him a kindred spirit to, say, Marguerite Duras, especially in the early parts of the film where Françoise’s voice lingers over empty spaces as she muses about unseen scenes of the Indian boy and his ancestral roots. The static shots and perplexing leaps in the timeline recall the work of Angela Schanelec, for example in the ways he depicts death, and the transformation of Pierre-Joseph from a youngster into a middle-aged man (played by Creton himself) within just one scene.
But these deliberate visual and structural tropes only serve to drive A Prince forward, as Pierre-Joseph continues to develop his relationship with his employer-turned-paramour Adrien (Pierre Barray), a physical and spiritual bond that is shown in all its sensual beauty. Meanwhile, Pierre-Joseph trudges on in his work as a gardener, a beekeeper and the builder of a religious mountainside cabin called Black Maria. This fascination with a religious icon eventually leads to a shockingly gothic denouement one would usually relate to, say, Philippe Grandrieux’s work. Marking the return of the mysterious Kutta (Chiman Dangi), Creton conjures up a vision of hell through Jozef Van Vissem’s cacophony of screeching noise-rock along with what is probably the most grotesque representation of human genitalia for quite some time.
This fantastical, left-field finale is proof of Creton’s ability to break out of his usual routine. But it also weighs A Prince down with its problematic, overwrought representation of that feared racial and sexual Other. Which is a shame, given Creton’s respectful reflections about India in his past work; L’Arc d’iris, Memories of a Garden (2006), the film he and Barré filmed in the Himalaya-bound Indian state of Himachal Pradesh and the only piece he has made outside of Normandy, is shown in parts in A Prince. It’s a misstep which alightly takes the shine off an otherwise inventive, invigorating and emotionally engaging film.
Director: Pierre Creton
Screenwriters: Pierre Creton with Mathilde Girard, Cyril Neyrat, Vincent Barré
Cast: Antoine Pirotte, Pierre Creton, Vincent Barré, Manoon Schaap, Mathieu Amalric (voice)
Producer: Arnaud Dommerc
Cinematographers: Antoine Pirotte, Léo Gil-Mena, Pierre Creton
Editor: Felix Rehm
Music composer: Jozef Van Vissem
Production companies: Andolfi, JHR Films
World sales: JHR Films
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Directors’ Fortnight)
In French
82 minutes
