Review: Prince's "Under the Cherry Moon" Explodes With Personality
Our second Movie of the Week follows Prince's next cinematic outing
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Under the Cherry Moon, Prince’s second feature film (and first solo directorial effort), obviously doesn’t have a particularly good reputation, and there are plenty of self-evident reasons why audiences bounced off it so hard in 1986 (while embracing the stellar soundtrack album, Parade). Instead of the concert-film-cum-intimate-character-drama that propelled Purple Rain to massive success in 1984, Under the Cherry Moon is a very broad comedy with humor that isn’t particularly mature or sophisticated; its main aesthetic and cinematic touchstones are from the 1930s, not anything else playing in theaters in the 80s; the narrative is messy and slapdash (Prince’s Christopher Tracy and Jerome Benton’s Tricky have an only semi-legible fallout at one point, which is resolved for completely illegible reasons a few scenes later), and the film builds to an incongruously dark ending it does not even begin to earn; and unlike the wall-to-wall music of Purple Rain, most of the original songs here play briefly in the background, with the first (and only) full diegetic musical number arriving 42 minutes in. There is a sort of student film indulgence to the entire thing, animated by a sort of theater kid ‘look at what I can do!’ energy, that will inevitably test a lot of viewers’ patience.
And yet. I liked Under the Cherry Moon. And I’m really glad it exists.
Here’s the thing: you don’t realize how many movies lack real personality until you see something like Under the Cherry Moon, which exudes so much personality – all of it unmistakably and irreducibly belonging to Prince – that it is impossible, for me at least, not to smile. The film is supremely earnest, and it aims to please so thoroughly and exuberantly that I found myself rooting for it from frame one. Although his songs aren’t as prominent here as it was in Purple Rain, if you know Prince through his music, you can recognize his voice and obsessions all over this thing: His androgynous bravado, his singular sense of fashion, his often childish sense of humor, his glee at mashing bits of style and tone that don’t naturally go together – and, of course, his irrepressible, incandescent horniness (one of the first shots after the opening credits sequence is a zoom past the sculpted muscles of a naked male statue to the word ‘Nice’ on a wall, and one of the last images before the end credits is an upskirt shot).
It’s all there, so much so that even if Prince wasn’t physically on screen, you would feel his presence. It means we get moments like Christopher and Tricky poking fun at love interest Mary’s upper-crust lifestyle with the words “Wrecka Stow” – endearingly goofy, and not the way anyone else would construct that kind of scene – but also completely transcendent bits of real audiovisual romantic power like Christopher meeting Mary in his car at the airport as she’s about to leave. “Ok then, I love you,” he says. “Define love,” she rejoinders. Then the iconic opening guitar lick of “Kiss” kicks in, and an impossibly passionate locking of lips begins on screen, and we’re treated to an absolutely perfect movie moment so good the film briefly becomes an out-of-body experience. Prince could be both of these things and so many more, and Under the Cherry Moon showcases the range.
That aforementioned moment, and several others throughout the film, also scrambles our standard definitions of what a “movie musical” even is. Other than the performance of “Mountains” up in heaven over the end credits – an all-time great music video landing with the force of a mic-drop at the end of the film – we never see Prince and the Revolution playing music in the film. And in the “Kiss” scene, it’s not the on-screen character Christopher Tracy singing his response to Mary’s demand to “define love” – it’s Prince the musician singing, and the Revolution performing, his answer on the soundtrack while Prince, the actor playing Christopher Tracy, gives the cinematic equivalent of the song on screen. Whatever shortcomings one wishes to lay at the feet of this movie, one cannot deny that Prince understands, on a visceral level, the power of music and image working in tandem. Under the Cherry Moon doesn’t showcase that as often or as forcefully as Purple Rain did, but it does it just enough to remind you there’s an actual honest-to-God genius steering this thing.
The film itself defies easy classification, of course. Under the Cherry Moon is somewhere between a Zucker Brothers comedy (a la 1984’s Top Secret), an 80s sex romp, and a 30s MGM musical pastiche, all of it shot through with the most glorious sense of camp. And this is, indeed, a major work of Camp – not in the lazy pejorative sense of the word (i.e. “this is campy,” the response of uncurious people to material that makes them uncomfortable for reasons they cannot articulate), but as an active aesthetic and tonal choice undergirding the entire film. There is something phenomenally interesting to me about a movie that is, on its most basic level, taking the structure of Gold Diggers of 1933 or a Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vehicle and putting Prince in the kind of role usually occupied by a woman: the young penniless ingenue moving up through the world. And he plays it, in composure and language and costuming, through this gender-bending androgynous camp framework that actively invites any number of queer readings (it’s not an accident the movie substitutes the word ‘whore’ for the word ‘gigolo’ on a number of occasions, with women lobbing it at men the way men would usually lob it at women, forcing the viewer to stop and think about how those words are in fact gendered and used differently). If, as many academics have argued, the concept of “camp” comes from the influence of queer artists on classic Hollywood musicals, playing up the absurdity of the heteronormative world through aspects of film form, then Under the Cherry Moon feels like a sort of active treatise on that idea. Prince knows what he’s doing here, and he knows what pieces of Hollywood history he’s engaging with and responding to; you don’t have to like it, but you can’t deny the film is walking the walk.
It helps, of course, that the entire film is animated by the most absurdly gorgeous black-and-white cinematography from the great Michael Ballhaus, a year after he started his long collaboration with Martin Scorsese on After Hours. Prince didn’t mess around when it came to cinematography; it reminds me a bit of how, today, Taylor Swift has used Rodrigo Prieto (also a Scorsese regular) as DP on several music videos. It’s a hire you don’t make if you aren’t cued in to film culture and talent, and want to swing your weight around by getting the best of the best. And Prince certainly got a stupendous-looking film from Ballhaus – an even better-looking one, I’d say, than many of the 30s films (like the Gold Diggers movies) it’s riffing on. The locations and costumes and interplay of light and shadow; the way light wraps around and sculpts faces; the extraordinary production design and use of mirrors and glass to create reflections or dynamically refract light – it all just looks spectacular up on the screen. There is a superimposition of Prince and Mary mid-coitus over her outstretched hand and arm post-coitus that stands as a hall-of-fame-caliber capital-G Great shot, and some of the images in and around the car as Prince drives Mary away at the end are just breathtaking. I’d have trouble disliking any movie that looks this outrageously good. Thank God Warner Bros. has given it a great Blu-ray release, one you can pick up on the cheap – it’s a stunner.
Speaking of stunners – Kristin Scott Thomas co-stars here as Mary in her feature film debut, and she’s absolute dynamite, totally on the film’s bizarre wavelength and threading that needle between 30s pastiche, Zucker-style absurdism, and the earnest romance of it all. And she does it all looking as good as anyone ever has on screen – no mean feat when you’re standing next to Prince, in his prime, for two full hours. The film would not work without her, and even if you remain unconvinced of Under the Cherry Moon’s other merits, it is worth watching just to see the birth of a great actor who came out the gate swinging for the fences.
I have reflected before that ‘good vs. bad’ is a much less useful framing for discussing movies, especially if you care about and are actively engaging with the art form, than ‘interesting vs. uninteresting.’ Under the Cherry Moon is nothing if not profoundly interesting. It is the kind of movie you can point to and confidently say “yup, there is simply no other film on earth quite like this one,” and that’s a sensation I cannot help but love. Like Prince himself, this film is one of a kind.
NEXT WEEK: We’ll be discussing the third film Prince wrote a soundtrack for in the 1980s, though this one’s a little bit different – it’s Tim Burton’s BATMAN, and I’ve written 9 solid pages about it.
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