Don’t be fooled by The Prince & Me’s questionable marketing campaign, which seemingly promises a shrill Mona Lisa Smile-sized fantasy for tween girls who don’t believe in Santa Claus but nonetheless think their prince may come. Martha Coolidge surprisingly’s intelligent dramedy is largely hung-up on façades, and is critical of the misogynistic fairy tales that promise young girls all the wrong things.
From the start, Coolidge playfully teases the main characters’ inevitable meet-cute. In Manitowoc, Wisconsin, future doctor Paige Morgan (Julia Stiles) races to make a 10 o’clock appointment. In Copenhagen, Denmark, the country’s perpetually horny prince, Edvard (Luke Mably), races a friend across the countryside to the supreme delight of local paparazzi. Just as the hazardous montage of speeding vehicles coyly suggests that Paige and “Eddie” may just collide despite being a continent and an ocean apart, sparks also fly during chemistry class and deconstructions of Shakespeare’s sonnets. In Prince & Me, fate will not be ignored and it asks its characters to look beneath economic, cultural, political, and even genre surfaces.
Just as Eddie tweaks a lawnmower-cum-racecar for Paige’s brothers during the Thanksgiving holiday, the filmmakers happily tweak the Cinderella fantasy. Eddie comes to Wisconsin expecting a live-action spectacle of Girls Gone Wild, but instead, the undercover prince falls in love with a girl who unsuspectingly tames his lascivious heart. Intimidating, sarcastic, and unwilling to admit defeat, Paige is hellbent on a career in medicine, but when presented with the kind of “corny schoolgirl fantasy” that happens only in Shakespeare (or to Grace Kelly), she must decide whether submitting to this lifestyle also means betraying her womanhood.
The Prince & Me ends a little too tidy, but it’s full of surprises until then. The chemistry between Mably and Stiles is remarkable, and Coolidge’s framing is consistently witty, and often in ways that are smartly taking into account Paige’s moral trepidation and everyone’s sense of social propriety. And Coolidge’s compassion is such that she looks at the intimate doorway into Paige’s farm in the same way that she does the entrance into Eddie’s palace, she reinforces the need to keep her charmed characters on the same level playing field.
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