Prince of Muck (2021)

Directed by: Cindy Jansen | 77 minutes | documentary

Running a farm on a rainy island where only a handful of people live and it’s always windy? It is certainly not everyone’s dream. But for Lawrence MacEwen, the titular prince of the Scottish island of Muck, no other existence is imaginable or tolerable. “Time will tell whether someone can become an islander”, he muses on the question of whether his existence is also reserved for outsiders. Family-owned since 1896, the rugged stretch of isolated land is where the bearded Scot has spent most of his adult life.

By now, Lawrence is no longer so much the prince of the picturesque island, but rather an aging king whose body no longer always does what the mind wants. For the long walks (often barefoot) of the past, the amiable, lively and headstrong man now needs a walking stick. The farm is now run by Colin, Lawrence’s son. This creates the necessary friction between tradition and modernity. In a flashback we see how a younger Lawrence tells that changes on the island are inevitable, but must come slowly. “We want evolution, not revolution.” Officially, Lawrence is only concerned with the cows. He does this job lovingly (thanks to their spacious stables and regular walks along the coast, his cows are better off than many pets), but visibly struggles not to get involved in the business of his son Colin.

Director Cindy Jansen succeeds very well in making the tensions bubbling under the surface within the family extremely subtle, yet strikingly tangible. “I’m not useless, although my son often thinks I am,” is one such statement by Lawrence, for example, which indicates that there are quite a few squabbles between them. The diary entries that Lawrence has consistently kept for decades are the common thread of the story. The writings are structured according to a fixed pattern: a mention of the date and description of the weather (temperature, precipitation, wind strength), followed by a summary of the tasks performed that day or an event. Often these dry descriptions are fairly trivial, but sometimes they also describe major life events (the suicide of Lawrence’s brother) or the immense power of the elements, sometimes barely comprehensible to the human brain (the consequences of a sea storm that hits the island hard). . The notes illustrate that death and tragedy are also inextricably linked to a life close to nature on an inhospitable island.

The beautiful images of the sometimes ominous clouds and the hilly Scottish landscape ensure that the island of Muck actually becomes a character. Just as authentic and inscrutable as Lawrence, but more capricious and less compassionate. The images are sometimes so atmospheric that you can almost feel the salty sea air flowing into the cinema or living room. ‘Prince of Muck’ is ‘slow cinema’ in optima forma, thanks to the sober narrative style and the sometimes somewhat languid pace of narrative, but at the same time it is also a beautiful portrait of a man who stubbornly clings to a way of life that is dying out in the West. The diary texts also illustrate that the glory days of the past slowly fade with the passing of the years. They once took up half a page, but have now shrunk to a few sentences.