Director: Alex Zamm
Writers: Karen Schaler, Nate Atkins
Cast: Rose McIver, Ben Lamb, Alice Krige, Honor Kneafsey, Sarah Douglas, Emma Louise Saunders, Theo Devaney, Daniel Fathers, Tahirah Sharif, Amy Marston, Joel McVeagh
Runtime: 92 mins.
2017
Amber (Rose McIver) is a reporter who just can't seems to get her big break. She gets an opportunity to cover the press conference of a playboy prince, which she hopes will be her big break. When she arrives she discovers no big break whatsoever, as the prince is a no-show. Instead of leaving with the rest of the press, she infiltrates government property, photographs some suits of armor, and when she is caught she conveniently steps into the identity of Princess Emily's American tutor who was expected soon but not this soon. Armed with identity fraud, she launches a campaign of reconnaissance and subterfuge, all the while falling deeply in love with the conflicted Prince Richard (Ben Lamb) in the process. This is all treated as light farce.
What kind of country is Aldovia? Who governs the people and how? The King is dead, yet the Queen's only role is to show up and deliver zingers every once in a while? Are the royalty figureheads, or is this a full-on monarchical hegemony? Is there some sort of elected Parliament that we are not given access to?
On second thought it would feel inappropriate to learn any of the political reality of this nation, because Aldovia is the stuff of pure, uncut fantasy. White, middle-class fantasy to be specific, wealthy enough to crave the touch of old money prestige, poor enough to buy into the monarchy as anything other than stuffy rituals and child sex trafficking scandals.
Aldovia is an ideal vessel for these projections, even lighter on context than The Princess Diaries' Genovia. The country is vaguely European, slaking the American thirst for the foreign and unusual, and the country is populated with white people speaking in British accents, assuaging the American disdain for the foreign and unusual.
The whiteness is crucial to the inner workings of A Christmas Prince. The only non-white person featured in the film is Melissa (Tahirah Sharif), who along with gay friend Andy (Joel McVeagh), occasionally Skypes in to offer Amber advice.* Can you imagine what would happen if Melissa got the assignment instead? I don't imagine a Black woman would be given free rein of the estate just because she awkwardly declares herself to be the American tutor showing up early and unannounced. Certainly all the jokes about the protagonist being a "commoner" and "peasant" and "the help" would take on a whole different tenor...
*Really struggling to meet your diversity quotient when you have to Skype in the only Black character, huh A Christmas Prince?
What if the Christmas Prince himself weren't white? The entire movie would fall apart.
Spoilers ahead, for there is a late-game plot hatched be evil ex Lady Sophia (Emma Louise Saunders) and Count Simon (Theo Devaney) to snatch the throne from Christmas Prince because they discover he is adopted. This is, of course, after Lady Sophia fails to seduce him because there's an American in town. This birthright revelation leads to that classic movie climax, a triple coronation, the first two having been invalidated by last minute objections.
I will give A Christmas Prince this, it moves along at an incredible clip. Entire arcs have been wrapped up neatly and socked away by the time we get to the strangely artificial finale. I imagine the revelation of the Christmas Prince's false bloodline exists not so much to challenge the monarchy but to demonstrate that these are the good kind of monarchs. Everything is resolved by a secret edict from the late King that allows a Christmas Prince to inherit the throne even if he is not of royal blood. This edict effectively proves that God is not dead, thus cementing A Christmas Prince as a Christian movie in all but name.
Yes, despite its secular trappings,** CP is a Christian movie through and through. It has all the telltale signs. Overlit compositions. Cinematography so flat that some scenes look like they're staged in front of Zoom backgrounds. Actors who forget how to talk because they are trying so hard to inflect emotion into their voice. Production design that is supposed to be gaudy and grand but instead looks like a gaggle of moms raided the Dollar Store and rented a YMCA to cover in tinsel for an afternoon. A little girl with spina bifida who teaches the main character that anything is possible. A protagonist who acts like perfectly wholesome activities are the most mischievous antics in the world.
**Nobody bonds over Christ, but everybody bonds over Christmas.
So is that all there is to A Christmas Prince? A bland, middlebrow marriage fantasy generated by Netflix's algorithm to target the embedded Christian values of the white middle class?
No. For A Christmas Prince is a roulette wheel of kinks and perversions. Every scene spins the wheel and you have no idea what it'll land on next.
Here is an incomplete, inexhaustive list of the kinks that A Christmas Prince visits upon us.
- a role reversal in which a privileged white American woman is made to feel downright working class
- exhibitionism, when Amber wears her prom dress to the ball and everyone stops and stares as she descends the stairwell
- public humiliation, when it is revealed to everybody at the coronation that the Prince's lover is actually a shameful impostor
- there is something perverse about making the little girl with spina bifida deliver multiple dick jokes
- the whole Parasite family-infiltration-kink
- being nasty to someone and then discovering later that they have a whole lot more power than you and you must instead be very nice
- walking in on your crush kissing his ex but then he pursues you because it wasn't what it looked like!
- any kink that has anything to do with adoption or royal blood is probably touched on at some point
- there's some cousin-cuck-play going on with the Count who marries the CP's ex to make a play at the throne
- holiday kinks, where you have to get coronated on Christmas day, and you have to have your proposal kiss at precisely the new year (while your father watches, smiling)
- speaking of which, parents being overinvolved in your romantic life probably counts
- horse girl stuff
- getting saved from a wolf by a prince
- this one I call omniscience kink, because God is always watching: multiple times Amber catches and video records (!) Christmas Prince doing Wholesome Things while he believes he is unobserved--first, playing nice piano, and second, playing snowball fight with a bunch of kids while he should be attending a press conference
- falling for a playboy only to discover that he is chaste as chaste can be, and the world misunderstands him
- royalty kinkplay... what is the royal family if not the Christian nuclear family exaggerated to absurd proportions, with all your private business being aired out for the world to chatter over?
I'm sure most of these have specific names I'm not familiar with, feel free to make a few kink Bingo cards and check the movie out yourself. It's rubbish, but it is rubbish meticulously crafted to tickle the fancies of repressed white people nostalgic for countless centuries of suffering at the hands of tyrannical monarchs.
1 / 5 BLOBS
I'm crying. This is the best thing I've ever read. Thank you!!!
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