Written by Linda
February 07, 2009
Call me navel-gazing, but I'm going to open this review with a personal anecdote. In 1995, I was in Denmark at the time the younger prince got married in a lavish and super-romantic royal wedding. It was like Charles and Diana without the cynicism. 25-year-old Danish prince Joachim was getting married to "commoner" Alexandra, who happened to be a gorgeous 30-year-old businesswoman from Hong Kong who could speak five languages. My friends and I swooned through the 12-hour live TV broadcast on a snowy November day. Funny enough, my friends and I were all foreigners, from countries without monarchies, and we were the ones most swept away by the fairy tale romanticism of it all (depsite being self-proclaimed modern women and feminists).
Now years later, I couldn't help but be dying of curiosity when I heard about a new film romance about, of all things, a prince of Denmark falling for an American commoner! Saddled with an unfortunately stupid title that, when slightly abbreviated, sounds more like a film about the artist formerly known as The Artist Formerly Known as Prince and perhaps his number one fan, The Prince & Me massages modern headlines and makes a harmless and rather sweet romance for defiant yet traditional teenage girls.
Luke Malby's Danish Prince Edvard is a blend of the real Prince Joachim and his older playboy brother, the Crown Prince Frederik (...who shares my birthday! And is finally getting married in May! To an Australian! Oh. Sorry.). He actually looks alarmingly like Prince Joachim, so they sure hit the nail on the head with casting. Edvard is a playboy, and decides to go to the U.S.... better yet, Wisconsin, to see if he can find loose girls like those in the Girls Gone Wild videos. I'm not kidding. Instead he meets headstrong, pretty, and of course super-smart Paige (Julia Stiles), a pre-med farm girl. She's sensible! Attractive! Grew up with lots of dairy products and knows how to shovel dung out of a barn! Can't get much more all-American than that. So Paige is unsurprisingly shocked when "Eddie" asks to show him her tits. Aaaahhh... the beginning of a beautiful romance.
The tension between them turns to curiosity, as Eddie realizes that Paige is much more than he expected, and with his "sidekick" Soren (who is actually his valet back at the castle) humbles himself to woo the pretty lass. He wins a tractor race (again, not kidding), they fall in love, and...
Oh crap! Suddenly halfway through, The Prince & Me takes a turn and decides to become almost another completely separate movie. Suddenly the backdrop changes from farmland to fairy tale castle, as Paige goes to Denmark to take a taste of a royal life that could be hers, if she decides to stay with Eddie. Will she get married? What about her plan to become a doctor? What is a young modern woman to do?
The Prince & Me, I must say, does have its charms. The two leads are attractive and have a nice chemistry together. Some jokes you can see coming a mile away, but thankfully, the film is never tasteless. It is a clean family film, and is completely inoffensive. Where it struggles, however, is trying to make a balance between being a traditional "I want to marry a prince" romance, and being a girl-power film at the same time. The film splits itself in half, and thusly feels twice as long as it really is.
But for a Dane-o-phile like myself, I thought The Prince & Me was cute. The sets are impressively passable as the Danish royal residences (apparently is was mostly filmed near Prague), and only someone who has been to Denmark would be able to make the call that the prince's country-road racing scenes were definitely NOT filmed in that country (which is flat as a pancake... or as flat as Kansas, if you will).
The overall feel of the film is pure enough that it just about makes you believe in storybook romances again. Just try to disagree with me when you see Eddie appear in full dress uniform on a horse, and the look on his face when he sees Paige in the crowd. Swoon, indeed.
