Prince's second movie (and first one directed by him personally) is much less tuned to the MTV wavelength than might have been expected -- especially in view of his previous screen appearance in Purple Rain. Until the closing credits (and until after his character has been shot dead), he does no singing on screen, although a couple of mouthings to what we can recognize as himself on a tape deck and a car radio. He does not in fact play any sort of singer at all, but rather a piano player cum gigolo, with an oddly shaped and close-cropped mustache and a torero's sideburns, in a French Riviera nightclub. And though the movie has a lot of music in it (and behind it), it is not even really a musical. Nor is it, as the exquisite 1940s-ish black-and-white might lead some to suppose, the least bit noir in attitude. To say what the movie is, and not what it is not, is not so easy. Contemporary in time-setting but deliberately passé in style, it is the very odd caprice of a very young man who chooses to view himself in terms of very old movies, and as such it is an entirely interior vision, separate and self-contained, distant but vivid, at the same time fatalistic and cheerful, nostalgic and childlike, opulent and ephemeral. If nothing else, it captures exactly the quality that was missing in the movie-memory sequences summoned up by the homosexual prison inmate in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and as a sort of aesthetic credo, it is fascinating and revealing in much the way those scenes ought to have been (and were, in the original novel). No one, certainly, can accuse Prince of attempting simply to repeat his earlier screen success. Nor of kowtowing to popular taste. The alternative accusations of egotism and self-indulgence are pretty near compliments by comparison. Or anyway the lesser of the two offenses. Photographed by Michael Ballhaus; with Kristin Scott Thomas and Jerome Benton. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd
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