Under the Cherry Moon

Like Prince’s music, perhaps this film is best taken in for its sensation and not its literal output. That, and the dialogue is just ridiculous. But Prince looks cool, owns his story’s loose ideology of churlish change, and stages some marvelously ornate shots.

It’s really Prince who’s the ingenue here. He engages in much mock-effeminate vamping, scampers around the French Riviera in outfits that would have humbled Liberace, and grants himself the most melodramatic death scene since Camille.

Shot in black-and-white in an attempt to evoke the sophisticated burr of '40s films, its intent is hamstrung by over-familiar gags, though the script comes more to life when Prince and Benton lapse into black street talk during their pursuit of moneyed women.

For all those out there who can't get enough of Prince, Under the Cherry Moon may be just the antidote.

An unconscionable mess of unyielding crassness, from the overall tone, which celebrates gaucherie all the while it's saying that love is what really counts, to the sound mix, which makes most of the dialogue, which is larded with impenetrable slang, doubly impenetrable. [04 Jul 1986, p.C2]

"We had fun, didn't we?" asks Prince at the end, just before he goes to heaven. It's nice that somebody did. [04 Jul 1986, p.3C]

As a director Prince doesn't show even a rudimentary sense of visual style, and his acting skills equal what his direction calls for. The whole film plays exactly for what it is, one long essay in ego massaging.