Purple Reign

BY Richie Hebden

My intention when conceiving this article was to argue that Prince’s wildly successful, glittery debut film Purple Rain was in fact quite lame, while his widely panned follow-up, the elegant Under The Cherry Moon, was completely rad. But then I watched Purple Rain again. And it’s brilliant. Pure bold computer-blue comic book brilliance.

However, it’s the kind of brilliance that must be viewed in a certain context to achieve maximum impact. One must surrender oneself completely to the Prince aesthetic, to go into a kind of ‘Prince Stupor’. This is not, like Control, that rare instance of a music film that even devoid of its soundtrack and historical context would stand as a legitimate work of art. But nor is it, like I’m Not There, an ambitious attempt to make an unorthodox art film that ends up feeling like a pretentious video clip. Purple Rain is basically an impressionistic, comic-book depiction of Prince’s early career in Minneapolis, that in its 106 minutes of light, sound, sex, ruffles, melodrama and corn-ball humour, perfectly distills the aesthetic Prince had been building since 1980’s Dirty Mind.

Its main theme is Prince’s struggle to stop his temperamental, reckless arrogance from undermining his talent, as a similar arrogance had ruined his father’s. The fact that Prince was willing to portray himself – one suspects quite accurately – as a petulant, paranoid, violent-tempered jerk (with a heart of gold) is what makes the film so interesting. Similarly, the scenes of domestic abuse and family strife, while acted with all the skill and subtlety of a daytime soap, are able to work on an emotional level because we are aware of the personal catharsis involved for Prince in portraying them on film.

Of course, it helps that a good deal of screen time is taken up by our villains, The Time’s Morris Day and Jerome Benton, whose natural chemistry and double-barrelled, charismatic ham provides welcome relief from some very wooden readings elsewhere – most frustratingly from the love interest, Apollonia. In build, expression and personality, Apollonia resembles nothing more than a female counterpart to the Terminator, or perhaps Pam Grier’s kill-bot teaching unit in Class of 1999. I kept waiting for her arm to fold inward and emerge as a rocket launcher.

In the end, it’s the music and visual style that make Purple Rain such a memorable film. Unlike Superfly, it’s shot and edited with a dynamic, comic-book sense of pace, and the scenes of Prince and the Revolution on stage and in their prime, at the very Minneapolis club at which they came up, shot with five cameras on juicy 35mm film, are just about the greatest thing ever.

As for Under The Cherry Moon, if Purple Rain was a comic book crossed with a video clip, Cherry Moon is a 1940s madcap romantic comedy crossed with a karaoke video. It’s handsome, it’s hilarious, and if you don’t crack a smile right now at the mention of “wreckastow”, I guess you’d better go rent it.