Week #4 2020: Under the Cherry Moon
Everyone has a friend of many talents; one also wishes to carve out the small part of yourself that hates them. You feel it most keenly in your early adulthood, where finding one thing that marks you out seems like an insurmountable task. Meanwhile, there are people who are riffling through life's possibilities without a drop of sweat, like Chalamet at the grand piano. As we age, and begin to flex our own skills and also realise that life deals out as many tricks as treats, this feeling passes. If you think it’s just me with this problem, look at the kneejerk derision anyone daring to try to become a multi-hyphenate receives (sometimes deserved).
I’m guessing the people who grew up with Prince Rogers Nelson never outgrew this feeling. A prodigious talent at music, vocals, dancing and (if self-reporting is admissible) fucking, you have to imagine that there was a small audience who greeted Under the Cherry Moon (1986, Prince), his directorial debut, as a major balm, that he wouldn’t be able to add ‘great director’ to his overflowing quiver of talents?
Because, despite a very successful soundtrack album, and launching the career of Kristin Scott Thomas, Under the Cherry Moon was the only misfire in an imperial phase of his career. Within an eight year period, he released Dirty Mind (‘Mick Jagger should fold up his penis and go home,’ said reviewer Robert Christgau), Controversy, 1999, Purple Rain, Around the World in a Day, Parade (the platinum selling soundtrack album for Under the Cherry Moon), Sign o’ the Times (a double album, talked down by his label from a triple album) and Lovesexy, a run blocked only by the Batman soundtrack. It’s an absurd amount of material, and as the albums progress each becomes more heterogeneous within itself, brimming with multitudes, culminating in Sign o’ the Times’s gospel/funk/soul/pop glory. Whether it’s too much in volume probably depends on your tolerance for Prince (and you might have guessed by now he is one of my few cultural non-negotiables, whatever your other tastes) but part of the genius of the sound is definitely its too muchness, the zany, throw everything against the wall approach that sees him yelping one second, monologuing the next, pitch shifting his vocal, doing epic vocal runs the next (and that’s just following his voice). It’s A Lot but never busy.
Under the Cherry Moon stands as counterexample to that balance. It’s a screwball-comedy-musical-romance lensed in beautiful black and white by Fassbinder and Scorsese collaborator Michael Ballhaus. It’s a story that’s pretty close to Ernst Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife: grifters on the Riviera seeking debutantes and inheritors of wealth, only to find themselves divested of their cynicism by that pox called love. Prince (and before we go any further it’s important to stress how category-defyingly beautiful he is in this film) plays Christopher, partners with Tricky (Jerome Benton) in a two-man operation to remove as much wealth from Nice’s ladies of leisure as possible. It’s not an expected setting or concept (especially following up Purple Rain's revisioning of his own life), but it’s a fantasia that makes sense for Prince to escape into. There’s echoes of James Baldwin in Prince’s extrapolation to France, where crossing race and sexuality lines have different valencies, while his look bears a strong influence of Josephine Baker’s diamante and white silk trademarks.
Yet Prince’s total vision of ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ excess – so much a part of his charm in music – sends the project deliriously, wonderfully, ridiculously outside of the bounds of ‘good movie’. There’s a big distinction between the level of excess we can stand between sound and vision. The eye reaches capacity more quickly than the ear. And, let me tell you, Under the Cherry Moon, hits your capacity pretty early on. Seemingly given the free creative and financial rein that it’d take thirty years and Beyoncé level clout for a black artist to land again, he takes every scene as though directing a new music video in the era that gave Beavis and Butthead such ripe material.
Both its success and failure lie in the fact that every scene seems to have been predicated on Prince turning to the crew on the day and saying, ‘You know what would be fun?’ It’s the same mental space that suggests it’s a good idea to put five or more skit tracks on a record. So we have Kristin Scott Thomas making her entrance to her party in her ‘birthday suit’ and going over for a session of impromptu nude drumming; a non-sequitur drag race on a horse track; and then this scene that suggests vampires are the real scourge of the Riviera. Every scene has Prince in a different outfit, from bathtub cowboy, to human doily, to Kenneth Anger biker. In his music, Prince is a figure of absolute play, someone who never contracted his possibilities as he aged. He has a childlike quality, even through his immense sex appeal.
Yet that meets a brick wall when faced with the pieties of what’s required in a film, resulting in something that’s both overcooked and underbaked. Yet, we should always be aware that who gets to take up space, to be too much, is a racial question. Excess is not dealt with equally for all (if you’re not white, even wearing a suit with too much fabric can start a riot). It’s hard to say whether I’d sooner have had a little bit more plot discipline but without the chaotic messiness. In all honesty, I probably didn’t need Prince to make a ‘good’ film. If an adage about comedy filmmaking is that if the cast had a good time, the viewer often doesn’t, this breaks that rule: watching him have a good time is entirely infectious (this newsletter is going out late because I overran making GIFs).
Both text and subtext of the film are that fun is the highest principle in life (money is really only a route to unlimited leisure, not power). Laying it out in explicit terms, Christopher is asked about his tarot card skills:
‘Do you do this professionally Christopher?’
‘Madam, I do nothing professionally, I only do things for fun.’
This sense of fun as a religion is deeply screwball. Almost every dynamic in the genre is about one character bringing chaos, pleasure and lifeforce into the other’s life, dancing them into the doctrine of fun. In Peter Swaab’s excellent monograph about Bringing Up Baby, he lays out how pursuing fun becomes its own moral code, one with duties that one can be excessively dedicated to. As he says though, ‘Like all ideals… it exacts its price and has its conditions of entry.’ Like the friend who is always making jokes, we occasionally need a break, to work out what any of this really means, whether there’s something else hiding behind all the cracking wise. Too quickly though in Under the Cherry Moon, we’re onto the next thing. It’s like a martial arts film where every scene is the finale fight, but instead of fights, it’s smouldering looks across a grand piano and hustler speak. It doesn’t matter; knowing there won’t be any truly new material from the Purple One means I’m happy to sit back, relax and catch up on all the Extra he left behind.
Other things I recommend this week...
• Janet Mock’s coda in Blood Orange’s ‘Orlando’ has a nice line on ‘too muchness’
• Rene Matic’s short ‘Brown Girl in the Art World III’ which I saw at London Short Film Festival’s ‘No Fact of Blackness’ programme, curated by Dan Guthrie
• Jacqueline Harpman's existential feminist sci-fi I Who Have Never Known Men
• Ronnie Lane’s ‘Just for a Moment’ (thanks Phuong Lee)
• You know what, the Batman soundtrack is actually pretty decent