Baby, He’s a Star: Prince’s Life in Film

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For better or for worse, Prince attempts to play an actual character: Christopher Tracy, who at first seems meant to come across as a free-spirited, outrageously dressed cabaret gigolo who hustles the underserviced wives of pan-European oligarchs. (In many ways, this film is no less misogynistic than Purple Rain.) But as Prince plays him, he is coquettish and ceaselessly juvenile. Christopher is attended to by an ambigiously gay assistant/manservant, Tricky, played by Jerome Benton, the only other holdover from Purple Rain‘s cast. The plot chronicles Christopher’s doomed love for debutante heiress Mary Sharon, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, in one of her first film roles.

It may seem like a plus that actual talents like Thomas and veteran character actors like Steven Berkhoff (the villain of Beverly Hills Cop) and Francesca Annis (the mother of Muad’Dib in David Lynch’s Dune) were recruited for the film, but they mainly have the effect of underscoring how inept Prince himself is. And they in turn feel at liberty to ham it up opposite him as much as they please. Purple Rain wisely made efforts to minimize the amount of screen time Prince had to spend acting, showing him mainly performing in concert. Under the Cherry Moon, unfortunately, has few sequences of Prince performing (a stilted dance routine set to “Girls & Boys”, and “Mountains,” played over the closing credits) and far, far too many of his and Thomas’s heavy petting, which are full of hackneyed quivering, clichéd close-ups (two hands clenching in ecstasy, for instance) and some artless, disturbingly aggressive grinding reminiscent of a poorly chaperoned high-school dance.

The film seems to be set in some weird amalgam of the ‘30s and the mid-1980s, in what may have been an attempt to illustrate the two different worlds that Christopher and Mary come from crashing together. But the tone comes across as inconsistent to the point of schizophrenia. The soundtrack has a few nods to Depression-era showtunes (particularly “Do U Lie?”) and some of the bit players adopt Hollywood Golden Age faux-English accents. But Prince and Benton’s diction is peppered with contemporary slang, and it’s anomalous to say the least when Mary gets behind a drum kit to play funk beats and lead a chant of “Planet Rock”. In general, the glitzy locales and elaborate costuming make the movie’s mise-en-scène seem like a lavish and lazily executed Christian Lacroix fashion shoot.

But for all its obvious flaws, Under the Cherry Moon has a tone and a emotional logic all its own. The film seems to be intentionally campy, which is to say, per Susan Sontag, that it fails to be campy. But oddly, all the mugging for the camera and the clumsy attempts at aping period films comes across as meta-campy—Prince’s apparent unawareness of how forced his efforts at campiness are transforms them into a higher, more rarefied form of camp. At that level of self-referentiality, it becomes hard to sort out what was intentional and what was accidental. As with all camp, there is the distinct possibility that the film’s peculiarity is meant to weed audience members out rather than draw them in. What would be left then is a hardend cadre of true devotees willing to indulge and support all of Prince’s whims.

Prince was clearly still preoccupied with the price of fame. Some may have regarded Purple Rain a sellout after his edgier, more groundbreaking early albums; Under the Cherry Moon seems designed to further alienate the fans who may have been baffled by the meandering hippie-isms of Around the World in a Day. The film’s brilliant soundtrack, released as Parade, pushed his music simultaneously in two directions, balancing some of the leanest and most percussive tracks he had ever recorded with virtually baroque, heavily orchestrated numbers that seemed calculated to display his virtuosity. What both styles had in common were the way in which they strained for some vanishing point at which they would cease to be recognizable as pop music and would live only as the sui generis creatures of Prince’s febrile brain.

The film also features Prince deliberately testing boundaries, but with far less creative success. Instead he pushes the limits of bad taste (Liberace is namedropped in one scene). Under the Cherry Moon reprises the theme from Purple Rain of professionalism being a kind of prostitution. In an early scene, Christopher, who has crashed Mary’s birthday gala, tells Mary’s mother, “I do nothing professionally. I only do things for fun.” This is ironic coming from the avowed gigolo, but it becomes the film’s central motif: the difficulty of telling the difference between love and greed, between true passion and rote professionalism. Christopher and Mary’s love (which peaks with probably the least exciting car-race scene ever filmed) falls to pieces when a jealous Tricky (jealous of who? It’s hard to say) reveals Christopher’s earlier scheming for her money. For her part, Mary seems poised to go through with her engagement to a wealthy suitor to please her empire-building father. And the cinematography seems to be caught up in the dilemma—during Christopher and Mary’s makeout sessions, the camera keeps wandering to their richly embroidered clothes to catch glimmers and sparkles.

After Christopher is exposed, Mary delivers the film’s pivotal speech, an elaboration of the sentiment expressed in the spoken-word section of Purple Rain‘s “The Beautiful Ones”.  She tells her mother, “You’ve painted a picture of a perfect world, and you framed it with hypocrisy, stubbornness, and lies. And you’ve hung it on a trust fund that I can’t get until I marry a man I don’t even love ... mother, look at me. I am the painting.” Prince seems to be saying the same thing to his audience, that he recognizes the degree to which he has induced himself to live out someone else’s ideal, but he knows that inevitably “the beautiful ones always smash the picture, always, every time.” Under the Cherry Moon seems like Prince’s preemptive self-destruction, conducted in the cheesiest, most lighthearted manner possible given the egos, the pressure, the expectations involved with its making. 

After Under the Cherry Moon, Prince more or less gave up on acting, though he did appear again as the Kid in the abysmal Purple Rain sequel, Grafitti Bridge. Instead, he intensified his efforts to scatter his own actual identity, surrendering his name and dissolving into a serious of ever more implausible roles for films no one would want to see made.