Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/The Princess and the Warrior

Movie Guru Rating:
Meditative (3 out of 5)

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Princess Complex

The Princess and the Warrior is a fractured German tale

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

What the heck is Tom Tykwer up to?

The German director made a deserved critical ruckus a few years back with his third feature, Run, Lola, Run, which layered quick-cut MTV style and jacked-up techno beats on top of Euro-arty musings about fate, destiny and the unknowability of life. It wasn't much more than the sum of its parts, but it had nifty parts.

Now comes the slower and seemingly more significant The Princess and the Warrior, which is by turns ambitious, engaging and baffling. It feels like an immature work, the strivings of a talented but restless artist who can't quite settle on what he's trying to say. As such, it is alternately heartfelt and laborious, a film that never quite pays off but is worth the effort all the same.

The plot isn't hard to summarize: Sissi (Franka Potente, who also played Lola), a young nurse at a psychiatric hospital, gets hit by a truck while crossing a busy street. Bodo (Benno Furmann), a young thief fleeing the police, happens upon the scene (actually, he's partly responsible for the accident) and saves Sissi's life. As a result, she becomes convinced he's her soulmate and tracks him down to tell him so. He resists, she persists, and there you have the crux of the tale.

But there's oh-so-much more. Tykwer lingers over the details of Sissi's life at the hospital, and also over the plans of Bodo and his brother to rob a local bank and move to Australia, and also over pretty much ever other facet of the story. Secondary and tertiary characters, including Bodo's brother and several of Sissi's patients, are given ample attention, partly by way of providing context for the leads and partly because Tykwer seems genuinely interested in them. This is a big and not entirely unwelcome shift from Run, Lola, Run, in which even the principals were never much more than broadly defined.

As in that film, Tykwer is also interested in the form of his story. Run, Lola, Run broke dozens of narrative rules, not least in its basic repetitive structure (telling the same story three times with different endings). The Princess and the Warrior is less dramatic in its experimentation, but just as marked by a determination to rework cinematic conventions. Several elements of the movie are deliberate clichés, rewired for Tykwer's sometimes obscure purposes. The hospital is a great, gloomy building, lit by strobe flashes of horror-movie lightning (in this movie, it always rains at night). The patients are a familiar assortment of psych-ward types, from the twitching pervert to the woman prone to explosions of profanity. Meanwhile, Bodo and his brother's bank-robbery scheme is a heist-movie trope.

All these elements together make for an odd mixture of thriller, Gothic drama and epic romance. But there is an unmistakable sense of purpose to it. Although it is not always clear where Tykwer is headed, he is using the genre trappings mostly as scaffolding for an idiosyncratic study of human actions and motivations—as in Run, Lola, Run, he's trying to understand why certain things happen and how much control we have over our lives.

Both Sissi and Bodo have complicated and painful pasts, which are revealed slowly over the course of the film. Both are looking for ways to alleviate the burden of their histories, to make something new from the jagged pieces of their lives. You could say the same for Tykwer's filmmaking—penned in by a century of cinematic influences and rules, he's looking for new ways to synthesize his materials, to give meaning again to storytelling approaches that have been eroded over time into rote reflexes.

At his best moments, he succeeds spectacularly. Take the accident scene, for example. After being hit, Sissi lies motionless beneath the truck. She can't speak or, she realizes, even breathe. We hear her thoughts, which are alarmed but detached in the manner of someone in shock and close to death. When Bodo performs an emergency tracheotomy, it is both unsettling to watch and strangely tender. The brutal act of cutting her flesh and then blowing air into her lungs with a straw is rendered with such caring detail that it's not hard to understand why Sissi interprets it as a gesture of great love. It is the key scene of the movie, and it takes the characters (and the audience) the rest of the film to come to terms with its implications.

On the other hand, The Princess and the Warrior is over two hours long and feels like it. Tykwer does a fair amount of rambling en route to the fairy tale ending that's implied by the movie's title. And it's hard not to wonder at his propensity for subjecting the lovely and gentle Potente (his real-life girlfriend, no less) to a series of physical and psychological degradations.

Still, The Princess and the Warrior has a heart and maybe even a soul. Like Moulin Rouge (which I happened to see the same day, and which resembles The Princess and the Warrior in no other respect), it represents an effort to move beyond the knee-jerk irony of the past decade. Instead of merely riffing on the detritus of the mass media age, congratulating the viewers for being too smart to believe in anything, Tykwer is looking for the human depths beneath the tawdry surfaces of all our clichés. This isn't the great film that he clearly wants to make, but it's a sizable step toward it.