Under The Cherry Moon (1986)

Now, before I go too far into this review, I just want everyone reading this to know that I've listened to more than one Prince song in my time and pretty much understand where he's coming from. At least in terms of his music.

He loves his music, he loves being creative, and he loves sex. A lot. Maybe too much. In fact, you might as well put the sex thing right at the front of this paragraph. I mean, what do I have to tell you; just pick up one of his CDs and read the titles of some of his songs - that'll tell you. Anyways, he's a great songwriter, superlative guitarist, and no one puts on a live performance quite like he. Even his contemporaries look to him for inspiration, what with gold after silver after platinum album to his credit.

When it comes to his film, he at least has 1984's Purple Rain, which not only made lots of money, had flashy direction by Albert Magnoli, a rockin' soundtrack, a sharp script by Magnoli and William Blinn and several good performances both in terms of music and acting (especially by Apollonia Kotero and Morris Day - by the way, did you know Day was Prince's cousin? Neither did I.) but also a solid acting base in Prince himself, whose character (called The Kid, but is ostensibly him) came through as raw and driven and fiery as any other man with a Jheri Curl bouffant hairdo and frilly shirts. In any event, it all came together and worked.

His Royal Purpleness made a grave error, however, in the assumption that a movie would or could be successful by the sole virtue of having him in the cast - right there in the front, headlining. Okay, Purple Rain struck a chord at the right time with the right audience. Here's the thing: Purple Rain also had a good director who knew how to frame his actors to their utmost AND it contained a good story about the personal struggles and dramatic tension behind the music and glitz to use as a blueprint to build on. What ended up happening (apparently) is Prince thought he could be in any story with any script by any director, just so long as he played someone who was more or less a thinly-veiled version of himself.

And hey, you know what else would work? He could direct it, too! Why not? All great actors can direct themselves at least one or twice and prove to The Academy that they are a multi-layered arr-teeste.

Just like Barbra Streisand.

So it then came to be our subject for today sprung forth: a movie for which if the term "vanity project" had not yet been created, it would have to have been - and not because Vanity was in it, either (she was old news by this time) - just to describe the logic behind a project like Under The Cherry Moon.

Under The Cherry Moon. It sounds like a Shel Silverstein book or an unfinished play by Tennessee Williams. And there's as much pretension here as in a whole library of Silverstein literature. Believe me when I say there's pretension to spare, in this movie and it coats the screen like so much Vaseline on the lens of a Barbra Streisand film.

(Hmm, two Babs references in one review. Better move on...)

Plot? Yes: two best pals from America - Christopher Tracy (Prince) and Tricky (Jerome Benton) - are living it up on the French Riviera by playing on the affections of many lonely rich ladies. Things are peachy until they set their sights on one Mary Sharon (Kristin Scott Thomas), a young socialite lady who stands to inherit over $50 million. Initial friction between Tracy and Mary soon melts into mutual love, much to the chagrin of Mary's ferociously protective father Mister Sharon (Steven Berkoff). But it may already be too late as Tracy is finding himself a odds between making a lot of money or finding the love his life has been needing.

If you cannot already tell that this script was written to showcase the love Prince already has for himself , then you should probably go and read something else. He didn't write the script, ind you, but it sure does seem that he had a hand in it - and probably two feet an an ear, too. Written by Becky Johnson, who would go on to write adaptations of The Prince of Tides (ANOTHER Babs reference? Sheesh...) and Seven Years In Tibet, cut her teeth on this script, which is basically a 98-minute love letter to His Purple Majesty. I mean, naturally Prince is going to be a worldly gigolo who is irresistible to women. and naturally he will live a life of luxury and insouciance. Come on; doesn't it stand to reason?

And more than anyone else, Prince would understand what a vanity project this is - that smug look of self-assurance, his heavily made-up countenance gazing into the camera with his big mascaraed eyes opened wide. And as everyone hangs on his every word or follows his every movie, it's plain to see that if this movie loved Prince any more than it already does, I wouldn't be able to safely review this movie without giving myself an NC-17 rating (much less be able to find a usable screenshot).

It seriously borders on discomfort, this movie. Whereas Purple Rain had a great ensemble of smaller characters to work with, all we have here to hold our interest is Prince. Everyone else onscreen is just a thang. No Morris Day, no Apollonia, no difficult home life, no emotional struggles, no musical triumphs. This is fantasy, plain and simple, with a good amount of slapstick buffoonery thrown in at random intervals. But mostly fantasy. It's a world where Prince and Prince alone is ladies' man supreme: it couldn't be any more fantasy if everyone rode around on paisley dragons.

Let's start with the direction. This movie was initially going to be directed by Mary Lambert, who got her start in music videos (natch), but it seems Prince and Lambert had "creative differences", let's just say, and she got her traveling papers so he could step in and take the reins. Okay, a lot of conceits are done by His Majesty, such as turning the camera around in a full 360-degree circle in a lounge area scene for no more discernible reason than the thrill of turning the camera around in a full 360-degree circle in a lounge area scene. Prince apes a lot of styles here and there (there's even a tracking shot through an outside market, a staple in most any foreign-set films) but it feels more like he's aping other styles than coming up with his own, He never emerges as his own director. It turns out to feel more like a conceit than anything else.

The only other conceit we have is that, while the film may have started its life as a color endeavor, it ended up as black-and-white. Yep. No cherry-colored film stock, not even PURPLE. Black-and-white. Know why? To give the look of the film some class. It wasn't enough to show the French Riviera and have people speak French and dress in tuxedos and evening gowns and have fancy hotels and mansions and classic limos all over the place...they had to convert every minute of film into black-and-white. They even managed to get the cinematography done by Michael Ballhaus, the same man who worked wonders with movies for Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and James L. Brooks. But so what; that's like putting up new shingles on an old outhouse: it looks a lot better, but you still know what's inside....

Okay, so Prince is no director. A given. But is he as good an actor here as he was in Purple Rain? He fails here for the opposite reason he succeeded in Purple Rain. In that movie, no matter how ridiculous The Kid may have looked and acted, he was still rooted in reality and had problems we could identify with and relate to, as any creative soul would. We sympathized. In Cherry Moon, Prince doesn't play a character, he plays a stereotype. An offensive stereotype, to boot. And I'm not even talking a RACIAL stereotype, either. What his Christopher Tracy is here starts out as and becomes nothing than an oversexed, domineering, rather bullying über-male, one who must seek out women, overpower them, dominate them and ridicule them. He gets plenty of opportunity to ply his craft here, that's for sure.

And as the woman he loves - now even though you're reading my blog, you should know who Kristin Scott Thomas is. The female lead in The English Patient and The Horse Whisperer and that Harrison Ford rom-dram where his and her respective fiancee and fiance die in a plane crash. You know the one; I can't think of it. Anyway, Kristin has been adored, admired, lauded, awarded many a laurel and praised time and again for being such a good actress. Which she is, really. But you couldn't tell it here. Kristin has a smooth, enchanting voice with a delightful accent and hypnotic eyes. But despite the requisite hate/hate relationship that begins as soon as she first meets Christopher/Prince, it melts into love/love pretty quickly - maybe a little too quickly. And then she spends the rest of the movie being easily bamboozled by his googly eyes and squealing mocking of her shouts during their lovemaking encounters as she hides her face in embarrassment/humiliation. Isn't it romantic? No wonder she badmouths this project, not only was it her debut on the big screen, it was a major release, so EVERYBODY saw Kristin's debasement. Would YOU have cast her in an Oscar-contending film just after seeing this? Me neither. Anyway, her purpose here is just to mirror Prince As Romantic Ideal.

Of course there's also Jerome Benton, taking a break from being Morris Day's hanger-on/literal-and-figurative mirror-holder to be Christopher/Prince's best pal/fellow gigolo Tricky. Get it? Tricky, because he turns tricks like Christopher but also he seems every bit the sneaky little hooligan. He laughs at Christopher's jokes, reminds Christopher that he (rather than Yor) is the man has an admittedly funny scene wandering around the bottom of a ladder while Christopher is romancing (or trying to romance) Mary. Since this IS Prince's movie, however, all of Benton's mugging, eye-bugging, flapping around, shouting, cajoling, running around at top speed and being all four Marx Brothers at once is to no avail and is really just a carbon coy of his work in Purple Rain. A real shame, seeing how many sacrifices must be made at The Paisley Altar, but Jerome Benton's purpose here is to mirror Prince As The Man Anyone Would Want As A Best Friend.

Then we have the even-sadder involvement of Steven Berkoff. I first caught notice of Berkoff in the 1983 James Bond classic Octopussy, wherein he plays rogue Russian General Arlov, an basically created one of the best latter day Bond sub-villains to date. And Berkoff ran with that role: bug eyes, veins bulging, voice rattling with rage and fury. he plays almost the same character here as Mary's father Mister Sharon, giving it his boiling, enraged all...but rather than getting a chance to create yet another memorable character here as he did in movies such as A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, Beverly Hills Cop and Rambo: First Blood Part II, Berkoff gets muted and toned down along with everybody else whose name is not Prince (or Jerome Benton, maybe). Instead, Steven Berkoff becomes the mirror of Prince As Stud Who Enrages Fathers Of Daughters Worldwide. Thankfully Berkoff is working as steady as he should be, working in no less than two-three movies and/or TV shows a year anymore, including David Fincher's remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Thank God he persevered.

You want to know what really enrages me about Under The Cherry Moon? Besides everything else about it? The fact that it was retro-fitted to be in black and white. Why? Because in its change-over, it somehow hoped that it would latch onto the same class and charm that films like Casablanca or Citizen Kane enjoyed. You know what? Casablanca had a better script, better direction, better actors, more class, more romantic intentions and the fact that it didn't have to depend on MTV to find a debut theater location.

You know what else? Just because your film is in black and white does NOT automatically make it good. Although Roger Ebert may disagree, the color (or lack thereof) of your movie does not instantly create a fan base for it. Or maybe it does - a fan base of shallow hipsters who watch ANYTHING black and white because they think that alone imparts class.

Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman was in black and white. Plan 9 From Outer Space was in black and white. Monster A Go-Go was in black and white. The Giant Gila Monster was in black and white. You see what I mean; sometimes a black and white is made because that was all they had to work with and they had to do the best with what they had at hand - not because the film makers thought they could add a touch of class to irradiated women and tin plates on fishing lines.

...AH!! Borrowed Hearts!

Uh, sorry. Where was I?

The only reason Under The Cherry Moon is in black and white is because Prince and company thought this would be the only way they could dress up a movie that is as dressless, classless, tasteless and hopeless as this one. if this is supposed to be a send-up of black and white romantic dramas, they failed. If this is supposed to be a romantic comedy, then they should have rethought the ending.

I'm going to go ahead and spoil it for you since you have no reason to watch Under The Cherry Moon anyway: Christopher, Mary and Tricky are being chased down by Mister Sharon and the French Coast Guard, who proceed to shoot Christopher in the back as he comes back to get Mary and boat away from it all. You know what, Prince; Stanley Donen re-shot the almost same-exact ending for his Liza Minelli/Burt Reyonlds/Gene Hackman rom-com Lucky Lady because he thought it was too downbeat and tasteless. Apparently you needed to do a little more research into what directors did and didn't do in such movies before you yelled "cut" and "print" on this one.

That was just another way to impart some worth into a character who existed only to self-promote, debase all around him and make even those who cared for him miserable. Just because someone dies in the last reel doesn't make me care for all the stupidity they did in the first few reels. Nobility does not befit a gigolo.

The only worthwhile thing in this whole film is its music. Prince And The Revolution provide all the music in the foreground and background music (except for the non-rock stuff, which was supplied by Clare Fischer), and the soundtrack gave us such songs as "Kiss" and "Mountains" which are tuneful and easy to tap your foot to. Of course, it all comes to the service of a film like Under The Cherry Moon, which you may get no entertainment value from if all you can think of are scenes from this movie to accompany them.

But as far a this movie goes, this is not what a movie that is supposed to raise up Prince on a paisley pedestal should be. It is a pretty harmful experience, and has yet to earn back the $12 million it took to get it made. If anything, Under The Cherry Moon turned out to be only an advertisement for its own soundtrack.

My advice? Buy the soundtrack instead.

One last thing: there is a minor character here who plays Christopher and Tricky's easily-swayed landlady Katy, who is played by a very beautiful lady named Emmanuelle Sallet. Her eyes, her lips, her hair, every part of her is beautiful, but she is just as easily debased, pushed around and manhandled as every other woman in this film. In fact, the very last scene of the movie involves an upskirt shot of Miss Sallet as she moons the camera.

I can think of no more appropriate a way to explain the contempt Prince felt for his audience than this. Same to you, fella.