Princess – Raindance Festival Review

Director: Tali Shalom Ezer

Cast: Keren Mor, Ori Pfeffer, Shira Haas

Running time: 92 minutes

Country: Israel 

Twelve year old Adar (Shira Haas) lives in a considerably oversexed family. In fact she cannot sleep at night due to the sounds of her mother (Keren Mor) having sex with her new boyfriend. When she gets her first period her mother leads her into the bathroom, where she proceeds to get naked in front of her and take a shower, telling her she is a woman now. The boyfriend Michael (Ori Pfeffer) isn’t much better – playing physical games with her that are highly inappropriate. Growing up in such an odd household, she understandably has a complex attitude towards her own growth, which affects her grades at school – not that her mother minds, telling her that they can’t kick her out, she’s too clever.

This is kind of hard to believe given her life choices, skipping school to mill about in that particularly indie film way, lingering on rooftops and smoking endless cigarettes. On one of her aimless wanderings she meets Alan (Adar Zohar-Hanetz), a vagrant boy, who looks like her long lost twin. He does little more than pout throughout. We assume at first he will be a romantic interest, but Israeli director Tali Shalom Ezer has much more sinister intentions with this introduction. He is immediately accepted into the family to devastating effect, his presence pumping up that weird sexual atmosphere to an unbearably uncomfortable degree.

Image: Marker Films

It is hard to say what the film is trying to achieve here, but the effect it creates is less than wholesome, especially when Michael gets much too close to the two children. The editing in this film helps to add to the disorientation, repeating scenes to evoke the uncanny, especially given the androgynous look of the barely developed children. There is a considerable formal technique here, building moments and moods subtly, but the overall result made me want to take a long cold shower.

 In trying to warn us against perversion the film ends up being exploitative instead

I am not against controversial material, but it has to have some kind of moral grounding to justify its misery. Films with similar material such as Kids or Irreversible work, because the style is cleverer than the surface content, working as a kind of implicit critique. Here the style is empty show, barely disguising its dirty material. When it dips into surrealism, as if to complicate its material, it simply makes it even more distressing. Princess has no sense of morality, other than blaming the mother’s hyper-sexuality for the daughters abuse.

I simply couldn’t buy that any mother could be that stupid and heartless, seeing her daughter as a predator instead of a victim.  By the end I felt positively sick. In trying to warn us against perversion the film ends up being exploitative instead, and basically artful child porn. As a critic, I have tried to say what’s interesting about the film, and appraise its interesting use of doubling and investigation of female psychology, but as a decent person I found it absolutely disgusting. Think Lolita without the irony, or Diary of a Teenage Girl without the feminism and you’re in the right ballpark. And if you really do want to see this movie, just don’t see it with anyone you’re related to.