July 1999 – October 1999
Wuppertal, England
X Filme Creative Pool with WDR
Intl. Filmfestival Venice 2000
12 October 2000
X Verleih AG
Studio Canal+
Sony Classics

• Official Competition Venice 2000
• German Film Awards in Silver 2001 for best film
• Jupiter („Cinema“-Leserpreis 2001 – best leading actress Franka Potente)
• Gilde-Film Prize 2001 in Gold

Just as Bergman’s Cries and Whispers stemmed from the vision of four women in white, whispering in a large red room, so Tykwer’s The Princess and the Warrior originated in the image of a woman lying somewhere in blackness.  Conceived and written before Run Lola Run had opened in Germany, this may in fact be his greatest work to date.  As the title implies, The Princess and the Warrior has the texture of a fairy tale, with Franka Potente as Sissi, a Cinderella in search of her Prince – none other than Bodo (Benno Fürmann), the man who has saved her life after a traffic accident.

Tykwer is drawn to characters who live on the margins of society.  Both Sissi and Bodo struggle beneath the weight of emotional baggage.  She has grown up in a psychiatric clinic as the daughter of a nurse and an inmate.  He has witnessed his wife being killed in an explosion and fire at a gas station.  The film charts their relationship from its bizarre beginnings as he inserts a straw in her windpipe while she lies beneath the truck, to their enforced flight after a bank robbery that goes awry and results in the death of Bodo’s brother, Walter.  Like Lola and Manni, and like Philippa and Filippo in Heaven, they nestle together in a bubble of intimacy and illusion.  Destiny unites them and Tykwer paints the pair with such remarkably sympathetic brush-strokes that we hold our breath as they ignore the cops and leap into a void hand in hand, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or Thelma and Louise.  In fact, it’s only a few storeys down, into a murky lake at the psychiatric clinic, but in one of the movie’s most lyrical images, they swim upward through the effervescent water to salvation.  Purged at last of the complexes that have maimed their lives thus far, Sissi and Bodo find their way to “the end of the world” – a remote, gracious house perched on the French coast and owned by an old friend of Sissi’s.  Society and its laws slip out of focus, and the lovers are free to conclude their fairy-tale, just as the young fugitives will ascend to “heaven” in Tykwer’s next film.

As Run Lola Run demonstrated, Tykwer knows how to carve time into significant, often wafer-thin slices.  Paying tribute to the opening of Kieslowski’s Red, the prologue follows the hectic progress of a letter written and posted in France, before it reaches the austere building in Wuppertal where Sissi lives and works.  The action accelerates into pixilation at certain junctures, a technique that Tykwer also uses to good effect in his short film, True.  At other points, time almost congeals, as when the couple jump off the roof of the clinic and seem to hover in space.  Tykwer introduces subjective moments with an audacity that’s become his trademark.  Whether it’s the jealous patient, Steini, imagining his beloved Sissi’s mother in her bath, or Bodo meeting his “other self” at the gas station, these scenes add richness of psychological detail to the fabric of the movie.

Tykwer also has a gift for shaping characters out of the least promising material.  For Sissi, he writes dialogue that manages to combine both her childlike innocence and her inner strength and persistence. She speaks slowly, as though trapped underwater.  She is understanding, forgiving even, when attacked by the inmates of the clinic where she works.  Tender, vulnerable, Sissi nonetheless exerts an hypnotic power over people who stand in the way of her search for Bodo, her saviour.  Her goodness is expressed in almost subliminal ways.  For example, when she thrusts the blind, helpless Otto out of the path of the truck just before it smashes into her.

For Bodo, Tykwer creates lines and situations that are one moment violent and aggressive, the next ominous and dreamlike.  Benno Fürmann plays him with a latent, unnerving energy.  Haunted by nightmares about his past, he lives in a kind of spiritual penumbra, controlled in an everyday sense by his calculating brother but somehow awaiting the release that Sissi can afford him. Only in the next to last shot of the film can he permit himself a shy, chaste smile, and lay a hand of friendship on Sissi’s knee.

Tykwer pursues in this film a state of purity, a purity of expression that finds its most marvellous quintessence in a scene in the clinic, as Bodo and Sissi sit in an empty, padded room and talk to each other, and Bodo at last confesses the tragedy of his wife’s death.  The camera glides around them in a 360º circle, so that their conversation, punctuated by moments of silence, acquires the intimacy of a dream.  Sissi and Bodo seem to be floating out of time, an effect reinforced towards the end of the film, as the “space cam” hovers above the couple as they arrive in France and then soars away with Olympian detachment.  Wenders achieved this effect in Wings of Desire, but Tykwer’s is a warmer, more tender vision.

Close-ups, as always in Tykwer,  reveal so much more than they do in the average movie.  The way he and Frank Griebe shoot their close-ups takes full advantage of the ‘scope format.  The human head becomes a mysterious landscape – eyes quivering, veering away in fear or modesty; hair, carefully delineated as in an Old Master painting; a cheek flushed, the receptive whorl of an ear.  Little by little, such shots open up the characters to us.  The enigmatic mood of the film is discreetly emphasised by the score, much of it composed by Tykwer and his colleagues Reinhold Heil and Johnny Klimek, as well as the mystical piano music by the Estonian Urmas Sisask which accompanies the robbery sequence.

If one scene epitomises the uncanny sensitivity of The Princess and the Warrior, it’s the anguished moment when Sissi is being rushed down a hospital corridor and Bodo, unable to keep pace, must let go her hand.  The feeling of deprivation, as Bodo’s figure is almost sucked back down the corridor into infinity, could not be more palpable.  And so this instant of loss serves as the spark that drives Sissi’s quest throughout the film.