If you’ve seen the coming-of-age movies and crime flicks that influence Sam de Jong’s Prince, you can guess where it’s heading within its first 10 minutes. Teenage boys with too much free time and too many hormones, menacing older boys who haunt their inner city neighborhood, pulsing house scores, adolescent infatuation, misguided masculinity, material obsession, and the lingering threat of violence all weave through the film’s setup. Its more vivid elements may tempt viewers into lumping Prince in with Nicolas Winding Refn’s school of disaffected genre filmmaking. But de Jong’s work boasts a naked sentimentality that Refn’s roundly lacks, and for all of its stylistic flourishes, Prince ultimately reads as anti-Refn.
Besides: De Jong is Dutch and Prince has a Dutch national focus. Comparing him to Refn feels as obvious as it does lazy, particularly when traces of Scorsese, De Palma, Truffaut, and proto-Anderson are easily sniffed out of his aesthetic. Prince isn’t a movie about casual cool so much as it’s a movie about dismantling the slick facade of casual cool. Its protagonist, Ayoub (Ayoub Elasri), a young Dutch-Moroccan kid living in an Amsterdam housing project, feels the magnetic pull of macho gangster bullshit early on in the film’s slim duration—he and his friends are captivated by the coruscating allure of branding, rattling off designer names in envy as they stand in awe of a purple-coated Lamborghini that serves as a recurring symbol throughout the picture. Gucci. Marc Jacobs. Zanotti. Valentino.
The car belongs to Kalpa (Dutch rapper and fashion designer Freddy Tratlehner), the local ruling hoodlum and a dedicated nutjob. Kalpa is the living embodiment of criminal ostentatiousness, and, of course, Ayoub wants a piece of what he has; he stares at his reflection in the Lamborghini’s window, literally seeing himself in the driver’s seat. (You may take this image as a tongue-in-cheek Refn nod if you like.) But Ayoub wants other things that aren’t his, too, whether it’s acknowledgment from his friend Franky’s (Jorik Scholten) older brother Ronnie (Peter Douma), or the affections of Laura (Sigrid ten Napel), who’s going steady with Ronnie’s right-hand man Vince (Vincent van De Waal). She’s the kind of girl who can smile at you with her laugh and laugh at you with her smile.