Purple Rain screens this evening at The Rio, as part of their RIO FOREVER celebrations.
Arriving some 40 years ago when the album of the same name and single “When Doves Cry” were top of the charts, Purple Rain (1984) tells the story of The Kid (Prince) and his attempts to learn to love and make music. As these things go in pop, the two are the same thing: too much like his father, his relationships are frosty and his music-making is burdened by the aloofness of a misunderstood genius. Enter Apollonia, a new-in-town love interest whose own ambition and beauty rattles the Kid’s half-disguised insecurity and threatens his band’s spot at Minneapolis’s First Avenue when she fronts a rival girl group opportunistically thrown together by the film’s antagonist — Morris Day, the film’s peacocking comic relief in contrast to The Kid’s sad boy brooding — who has his own designs on her.
The film doesn’t extend much beyond that synopsis sketch. Its plotting is deliberate and simple: by the end of its opening number, Apollonia has laid eyes on The Kid and she’s in love; by the end of the second she’s ridden on the back of his motorbike and stripped naked for him; by the next she’s sobbing in the club after he delivers a writhing, on-stage ultimatum (“The Beautiful Ones”). We learn that Morris Day is bad when he gets his butler to throw a scorned lover into a dumpster. Promoting the film, Prince claimed it was a deeply autobiographical work. His parents did divorce, and his father was a frustrated musician, but what its scant plot attests to most is his own infamous reclusiveness, one that persists beyond the grave, with his litigious estate making headlines only recently for the torpedoing of an extensive nine-hour Netflix documentary by O.J.: Made in America director Ezra Edelman.
The action on stage is where the heart of the movie lies. Not only because having Prince perform at the height of his powers and beauty – a lithe, impish amalgam of James Brown and Little Richard, bedecked in pearls and lace like a Black Liberace – is something most films don’t have, but, dramatising Prince’s own elusiveness, those performances do the talking he can’t. Not entirely in the finding-one’s-voice sense common to musicals, but in a way much stranger and seductive, capturing the intensity and eroticism of pop music. Outside of First Avenue, The Kid and Apollonia’s interactions have the romance novel’s underwritten inevitability or the Vaseline-lensed shoddiness of soft pornography; inside, “Let’s Go Crazy,” with its syncretism of the profane and the holy, is as good a come-on as any chatty seduction scene. Later, it’s not The Kid striking Apollonia that sends their relationship on the rocks, but the double-hander of “Computer Blue” and “Darling Nikki,” which adds an extra layer of perversity to a song that so appalled Tipper Gore by making it an act of sweaty, shirtless humiliation and cuckoldry.
At the film’s climax, after much brooding and a suicide attempt by his father (as in opera, when the film does concern itself with storytelling, it tends towards violence), The Kid decides to be less of a jerk and uses his powers for good. Becoming a more consensual band leader, he deigns to perform a song that his bandmates Wendy and Lisa had suggested to him earlier in proceedings in an attempt to save the band, who’re about to get the chop. Luckily it’s “Purple Rain,” its solemn, gospel-inflected plea casting a spell over the venue.
The rest is inevitable. After the performance, he flees backstage, pacing anxiously in his dressing room as if rousing from a trance, before seeking out and wordlessly planting a kiss on Apollonia. The twinned challenges of love and creation overcome, he returns to the stage for an encore of “I Would Die 4 U,” and “Baby I’m a Star,” unladen and springing across the stage. In the film’s final shot, taking cue from the religious ecstasy of the former track, seems to ascend, immortalised in a freeze frame that enshrines him in a saintly halo of light, coquettishly glancing back at us over his shoulder like a matinee idol.
Purple Rain screens this evening at The Rio, as part of their RIO FOREVER celebrations.