Set in the repressive era of Pres Allende’s 1970’s Chile, the award-winning The Prince is the nickname given to a pretty boy new arrival at a hell-hole of a prison.
He’s immediately taken under the wing of a much older inmate -called The Stud – though his straggly hair and paunch belie the nickname.
What writer/ director Sebastian Munoz creates with his uncompromising close-ups is the stifling claustrophobic nature of cell-life but also the endearing camaraderie of groups of inmates who almost turn themselves into self-supporting families.
It’s not for the faint-hearted: there’s a lot of realistic violence and the male-to-male sex acts are frankly displayed in all their macho brutality. There’s little room for queer love in this dreadful dark world, and yet love blossoms in the most unlikely way, between the Prince and his protector , and there’s also great music and singing, in a high-octane rendition of a tango love-song.
Juan Carlos Maldonado plays the Prince as an initially shy boy who won’t reveal his crime, turning gradually into the young pretender his title suggests. And when the Stud , painstakingly played in great nuanced detail by Alfredo Castro, is killed, Maldonado metamorphoses into the Mafia-like new cock of the walk, immaculately dressed and ironically repeating the Stud’s opening dialogue to a new shy inmate.
The film’s originality for me is in the combination of its harsh brutality and growing tender emotion, which in a surprising way works really well .
Amazon Video decided to ban the film , distributed by the innovative Peccadillo Pictures, who featured recently in Gscene. But the irony is that you can buy the film for delivery by Amazon !
It’s available now on several platforms and from Peccadillo’s online shop here.
You must be logged in to post a comment.