EIFF 2021: Prince of Muck
Cindy Jansen's Prince of Muck is a compassionate portrait of Lawrence MacEwen, the laird of the small Scottish island of the title, whose advanced age has pushed him out of his role as the island's chief custodian
It’s a powerful film that can make a working-class lad from the Lowlands care about Highland gentry, but that’s precisely the case with Cindy Jansen’s compassionate and quietly moving documentary Prince of Muck. The Dutch-Scottish filmmaker lets us into the small world of Lawrence MacEwen, the Laird of Muck, an Inner Hebridean island with a population of two-dozen or so souls.
Lawrence – well into his 70s and a bit unsteady on his feet – sees himself as a man of the people, but he’s most at home hanging out with his affectionate heifers, who jostle for his affections while roaming Muck’s beautifully barren shoreline. Things are less touchy-feely with his human family. His son Colin, who now handles the day-to-day running of the island and its farmland, isn’t his biggest fan. Colin appears on camera only fleetingly; we’ll see him charging through background shots doing some vital farm business as Lawrence dodders around in the foreground, or hear him off-screen chewing his old man out for failing to see through his few chores. "If he were nicer to me, it would be better," Lawrence says softly at one point.
The chief tension between father and son seems to be that Lawrence doesn’t want to be put out to pasture along with the knackered horses who trot around the place. He continues to stick his oar in, even though a job takes twice as long if he’s involved. Lawrence’s wife, Jenny, who’s more pragmatic than her dreamer husband but kinder than her brutish son, is caught in the middle.
Jansen’s mostly static camera captures her subject – both the man and his land – in painterly compositions worthy of Caspar David Friedrich. A smart addition is Lawerence’s poetic voiceover of his own historic diary entries, and even earlier ones by his father, which fill us on the island’s history without feeling like exposition. These extracts also help bring to the fore Prince of Muck's chief themes: the passage of time, family legacy and mortality. Any film set around a farm makes one think of death, but the feeling is even more acute as the frail Lawrence introduces us to a couple of lively calves he’s fattening for slaughter. A few archive clips from a documentary made decades earlier featuring a sprightly Lawrence in his prime add to the melancholy. The cycle of life is a brutal thing, but it’s also beautiful through Jansen’s eyes.
Prince of Muck has its world premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival