Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (The Princess and the Warrior, 2000)

Tom Tykwer

Germany

135 min, German (English subtitles)

I begin by admitting that I actually liked Tykwer's smash-hit Run Lola Run, although perhaps not nearly as much as many thought it deserved. The idea was clever, although not profound, and the execution was fresh. So I thought that The Princess and the Warrior would be something similar in the sense that it would retain all the good stuff from the director's previous outing and will add some new and exciting stuff. Development, you know.

Unfortunately, it seems that Tykwer took seriously all those endless paeans to his alleged genius and fell back on the same tired formula that has always saved people with nothing profound to say from the raging (and mindless) audiences: When in doubt, make it incomprehensible. And incomprehensible P&W really is, all representations of the director to the contrary notwithstanding. It is a shallow film in which purposeless characters meander down sterile corridors only to experience what can only pass as a pathetic excuse for initiative. In his interview, Tykwer claimed that the film is not about chance and fate but is instead about people taking charge of their destiny (and being rewarded for it). Nonsense, it is a film about several people who desperately want to possess somebody else and feel miserable when they cannot.

Take Sissi (Franka Potente) for example. She is a nurse at a psychiatric ward and her daily grind includes exotic stuff like dancing with the nut cases, attending staff meetings, massaging blind guys, and masturbating seeing ones. In short, nothing that has not been recited with tiresome abandon ever since One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest. Tykwer claims that the latter film was sensationalist and misrepresented what mental institutions really are. If his was "truer" to reality, then it was not possible to tell. Why do we have to be shown that Sissi helps Steini (Lars Rudolph) jerk off at night? Do we learn anything about him? Or maybe about her? Nothing except that she is a good nurse that does not object to the occasional patient ejaculating in the sheets. We do know a little about her background: Her father is in the nut house (although we are never told who he is) and her mother had been electrocuted in the bathtub when a blow dryer mysteriously fell into the water. Sissi is really a simple gal with no imagination, but with some compassion, whose only reason for working where she works is because she is too dull to envision working somewhere else. Once her world "changes" (tm), she is terrified that her little protective routine will "not be the same" (tm).

Talking about "change" and things "not being the same" worked wonders back in junior high when we wanted to impress chicks with "insights" about life and love. (And I am sure it only worked back then because they wanted to believe that we were not as stupid as we were... which we were.) From the vantage point of the wisdom accumulated in the last couple of years I can report that this crap is utter bullshit. So Sissi gets run over, so she has a tracheotomy, so she survives... so what? Why should that have been a life-altering experience? Did she suddenly realize how hollow her life was? (Was it truly that hollow?) I doubt it, but whatever her reasoning is, her next action is even less understandable. She goes to look for the man who saved her.

Now Bodo (Benno Fürmann) is one pathetic excuse for a man and I am not talking about the alleged gland problem. Tykwer claims that Fürmann perfectly understood his (Tykwer's) insight into the male psyche, according to which... drum-roll... men sometimes do stupid things just to avoid facing reality! Oh my! The profundity! The inspired thinking! If men did not do stupid things from time to time, there would be no marriages. Ah, never mind.

So this guy (Bodo) is "sitting on the toilet" (I did not invent this, his brother did) because his overly depressed and depressing girlfriend neglected the cigarette warning at a gas station and blew herself up after an argument with Bodo. I guess the poor schmuck believed it was somehow his fault. Or maybe not. Maybe he was just pissed that his girlfriend dumped him in such an unconventional way. Whatever his reasoning, the end result is the same: The same old story of crying, waking up at night, and hugging the stove. The good brother Walter (Joachim Król) spends most of his nights in fitful sleep, making sure that Bodo does not impersonate a pancake in his grief.

Actually, Walter is not so good. He almost kills Bodo to save him. The ingenious plan is to rob the vault of the bank where Walter works and then go to stare at kangaroos... not at the local zoo, of course, but in Australia (Sydney, to be precise, the escaped criminal capital of the world). When everything goes exactly not as planned, Sissi steps into the whole mess by another incredible coincidence.

Let me backtrack somewhat. Sissi, who is about to be miraculously transformed from a certifiable nut into a certifiable nut, decides that in order to effect this change, she must have Bodo, the guy who sucked blood from her neck with a straw. The two bros are naturally repelled by this idea, especially the young one, who will use any excuse to be a miserable wretch. Then there's some mud wrestling, some of it involuntary, and then Sissi lies beneath the stars just after the rain stops. (If you still don't get it, this is where you should get up, bow in the four directions of the world and chant "Tykwer is a genius and techno is his prophet.") After staring at the stars, Sissi decides to go to the bank. Profound.

Anyway, I do not want to tell the rest of the film. Suffice to say that what happens next is as ridiculous as what happened before. The ending, in particular, has got to be the worst offender, and would have been worstly offended if I were not laughing so hard at the rather puny attempt to make a statement. So Ebert may pontificate on how P&W was "a deeper and more ambitious film" than RLR, and about how this was a "film about the thin membranes that separate life and death, good and evil, success and failure, love and fear." Now that I think about it, Ebert's cliches fit the film very well, it is all one long, pretentious, boring, and ultimately empty exercise at self-indulgence.

The film is weak as a story. The film is also weak as acting. Although Franka is ok (nothing spectacular, mind you), Benno is plain horrible. This guy cannot emote stupidity if he had to, and this skill comes naturally to most people. The directing is so-so, with some brilliant moments interspersed amid the generally average schlock. The one guy who has to be fully credited is Frank Griebe, whose cinematography is inspired. There are some good things about P&W, but Tykwer should have explored the kinetic energy of RLR further, and should have abandoned the pretense at profundity. He's far too young to know anything.

December 9, 2002