17/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: The highly singular Pierre Creton imposes his fierce yet subtle style, encompassing the diary, poem, autobiography, novel and even sci-fi forms

Patience, direct observations of people and landscapes, a secret identity, penetration by something invisible… Pierre Creton’s films boast a unique, inspired and opaque kind of sensitivity, fashioned by his life as a filmmaker, farm labourer and gardener. From his early filmmaking days, the director has taken this ecosystem in the depths of Caux in Normandy and made it the heart and soul of his work, crafting films where novelistic fiction and incredibly raw documentary realism interact. It makes of him a unique talent who hasn’t escaped the attention of the most discerning cinephile circles, despite never being showcased in an international festival. But now it’s done, and rightly so, thanks to his 5th feature film A Prince [+see also:
interview: Pierre Creton
film profile], unveiled in the 76th Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight.

A trowel and then hands plunging into the ground: one of the film’s opening images immediately sets the tone: this movie is going to dig down, grasping the very essence of nature and attempting to recreate a primitive forest offering up a variety of revolutionary encounters for 16-year-old Pierre-Joseph (Antoine Pirotte), whose gunsmith (and hunter) father and taxidermist mother (an alcoholic drowning in sentimental romanticism) have turned him into an extreme introvert ("dogs alone could turn me into a human being"). Apprenticed to a gardener, our young man slowly extricates himself from his onerous past and evolves over the course of his meetings with Françoise Brown, the training school director (Manon Schaap), botany teacher Alberto (Vincent Barré) and his boss at the garden centre Adrien (Pierre Barray). It’s an initiatory journey in which drugs, lovers, transgression, floral compositions, greenhouses, a hunting lodge recycled into a home, a trip to the Himalayas, beekeeper Moïse, roses and brambles, and, at the end of the night (and possibly from his subconscious), Indian man Kutta (Shiman Dangi), Françoise Brown’s adoptive son, the new owner of the devastated Valmont estate in the thick of the forest, all come unbidden…

Adorned with voice-overs by Mathieu Amalric, Grégory Gadebois and Françoise Lebrun, A Prince unfolds and slowly takes shape on two levels (the lifetime of misadventures experienced by the protagonist and the subtler, invisible ones of the adopted Indian man). At times very confronting and underpinned by static shots cut through with rough humanity (broken up by a handful of breath-taking frames), the film speaks volumes, in fragmented fashion, about a kind of humanity where muted violence abounds and where physical love and manual labour act as medicinal plants and lucky charms. But weirdness is never too far away… Because, as we’re also told, "you have to understand that the road leads us home, yet far away from any abode".

A Prince is produced and sold worldwide by Andolfi.

(Translated from French)