Prince, The

By: GadgetGuy

By: waste of money

By: Amos Lassen

"The Prince"
In Jail, in Chile
Amos Lassen

Based on a novel by Mario Cruz, "The Prince", a Chilean prison drama won the Queer Lion at the Venice Film Festival. It is director Sebastián Muñoz's feature debut, set in 1970, just before President Allende brought his particular brand of Marxism to a liberal democracy backed by the CIA. At the time this must have seemed quite a controversial story with its scantily clad gay men cavorting behind bars but today it all feels rather dated and quaint.

Jaime (Juan Carlos Maldonado) is 20 years-old. and serving time for stabbing his best friend (Cesare Serra), possibly while having sex. In flashback, we see Jaime unable to express his sexual feelings in San Bernardo, Chile. Now he is sharing a cell with four other guys. He becomes close to Porto (Alfredo Castro) a sort of prison gang leader who will open him up sexually and teach him the ways of world, jail-wise. The prison is a violent place but there's also lots of full on sex, and Jaime soon starts to enjoy himself in this permissive set-up that would be undreamed of in the outside world. Jaime has endless playmates but it all ends in tears.

Porto shows a world weary complexity as the oldest male prisoner in Jaime's four bunk cell. He has a younger lover (Sebastian Ayala) but throws him over in preference to Jaime and names him "the prince". Jaime is an antihero but not a victim here as he seems to drift along in this sweaty paradise. He seems ambivalent to his position in the pecking order. Weirdly, it seems that all the other prisoners in the jail are gay, which feels rather utopian.

I believe that the use of the prison setting is a metaphor for finding love in the direst conditions. Jaime, is the new boy in town who quickly submits to the seemingly powerful Potro because he sees protection in him and because he has no other choice. Jaime then develops a love-hate relationship with a possessive, violent and manipulative man. Jaime is possessive, violent and manipulative but he is inexperienced in the ways of men.
The Prince challenges its viewers as it is quite aware that Jaime and Potro's love affair is not what anyone would call exemplary, considering they're repeatedly attacking each other and their first intimate encounter ends up in . Everyone in this story commits indefensible actions to survive or determine who's at the top of the pecking order. Director Muñoz never judges its characters or tries to give moral lessons. There's no room for morality in here: the cells are too crowded already. There is, though, plenty of room for moments of tenderness that Muñoz finds in this otherwise brutal environment. As we watch we are immersed into an otherworldly atmosphere that manages to be equally sexy and sordid.

"The Prince" is one of most homoerotic prison movies I have seen for some time, and it bears the influences of other queer movies of that genre. Jaime, The Prince, is actually happy to be in jail. He's been imprisoned for murdering a man he befriended and flirted with in a bar but it turned out that he preferred to with a girl rather than Jaime.

Jaime is a beautiful curly haired young man and when he is put in a cell with just one bunk bed set with 4 other men, he is immediately 'adopted' by Porto. Porto tells him that to survive here in prison he must be