It is a little too long, and takes us an extra lap around its ironic track. "The Princess and the Warrior" is not perfect. Consider an opening sequence in which Bodo is working as a gravedigger and laborer at a funeral home, and is fired for-what would you guess? Do you have an idea? He is fired for crying. He looks at his characters a little harder than most directors he isn't content with one level of writing to describe them, but needs many.
He is using the conventions of a bank heist movie, not to make a bank heist movie, but to lay down a narrative map so that we can clearly see how the characters wander off of it-lose their way in the tangle of their lives and emotions. Tykwer uses the elements of genre in his film, but evades generic simplicities.
While all of this is going on, we learn more about an elaborate bank burglary being planned by Bodo and his brother Walter ( Joachim Krol), and eventually the lives of Sissi and Bodo cross-not once, not just as a "coincidence," but in a series of interlinking connections that take on a life of their own. She asks him to retrace the route of the man who saved her life.
She knows a patient at the asylum, a blind man, who like many blind people is acutely aware of his surroundings and may be psychic. She holds desperately to his hand, then passes out, and later finds she has nothing but the button from his coat.
She has been looking into the eyes of this man who is saving her, and now she becomes aware that his breath is sweet and has sent a "peppermint sting" to her lungs.īodo accompanies her into an ambulance (it is his means of escape from the police-every action in this movie seems to have two purposes). Let us say, without giving too much away, that events have made Sissi acutely aware of the nature of each breath she takes. It shows greatness, not just because of what I've referred to, but by something more-the detail that Tykwer adds after the scene seems to be over. I will not tell you how he does this, except to say that the scene, in its horror, its detail, its quiet observation, its reliance on the soundtrack to tell us what is happening, is overwhelming in its intensity.
He crawls under the truck to elude the police, sees that she is dying and saves her life. They meet after Bodo unwittingly causes an accident that leaves Sissi pinned under a truck and choking on her own blood. Her co-star is Benno Furmann, who plays Bodo-a bank robber, among other things. Potente plays Sissi, a nurse in the psychiatric hospital, much loved by her strange patients, and so shut off from the outside world that when she shares a secret erotic moment with one of them, we sense they're performing a mutual service. It uses the same kind of crazy looping energy as "Lola," and is just as open to intersecting fates, but "Lola" was essentially about kinetic energy, and this is a film about the thin membranes that separate life and death, good and evil, success and failure, love and fear. It stars Franka Potente, who played Lola (she was also the stewardess married to Johnny Depp in " Blow").