Viking Night:
The Princess and the Warrior
By Bruce Hall
March 6, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
More specifically, those who belong to the Cult of Franka Potente will recognize this film as the more cerebral cousin to Run Lola Run - her previous collaboration with director Tom Tykwer . But in place of the slash and dash video game inspired exhibitionism of Lola, The Princess and the Warrior is a slow burn, more reminiscent of Tykwer's most significant early film, Winter Sleepers - meaning it's a voyeuristic look into the lives of strangers who come to know each other through a profoundly tragic chain of coincidence.
It's also the kind of film that doesn't give a crap if you're paying attention. It will occasionally confuse and frustrate you. It will openly dare your mind to wander. But eventually it will reward you for your patience - as long as you're equal parts cockeyed optimist who gushes hope in the face of misery, and miserable cynic who sees only irony in death.
Oh, Death. You so crazy. And speaking of crazy, The Princess and the Warrior is principally centered around two characters.
The first is Sissi Schmidt (Potente, in one of her best early roles), a shy young girl with an awkward haircut who works in a mental ward. Sissi is a dedicated caregiver who suffers for her craft and therefore shares a deep emotional bond with both her colleagues and patients. And boy, are those patients a motley bunch; and their level of not-okayness covers a relatively wide spectrum. There's Molke, who's vocabulary consists entirely of the words "Sissi," "fucking" and "shit." There's Werner - a plump, middle aged wallflower who is filled with compassion AND spontaneous fits of face punching rage.
And of course there's Steini, who looks like Steve Buscemi and Sonic the Hedgehog had a son. He also insists on being...um...shall we say..."physically serviced" by Sissi each night before he will sleep.
It's all in the life of a Princess for Sissi, who handles it with calm professionalism and maternal grace. Still, you can't help but wonder where the upside is when half your friends are psychiatrists, and the other half are your patients. And those patients are never going to get better; they're just going to grow old and die in front of you. So when you think about it, you don't work in a hospital so much as you work in a hospice full of futility.
But wait - there's more! Part of the staff compensation package is free room and board in the hospital! This might seem like a sweet deal until you realize this means you basically live in a house of death where all your neighbors like to fling poo and scream at you. Put a 52 inch flat screen and a waterbed in my room if you want, just make sure to pad the walls. Because petty soon I'm going to start hacking bits of my arms off like Michael Biehn in The Abyss. A little of that wall between doctor and patient comes down every day, and it never even occurs to Sissi that there's any other option.
Across town is Bodo (Benno Furmann), a former G.I. who lives in a dilapidated shack at the edge of a city park with his brother Walter. Bodo is haunted by the death of his wife and has a tendency to cry at random times and hurt himself in his sleep. He likes sunsets, long walks on the beach, and robs convenience stores in his spare time. Walter works as a security guard in a bank, and hates every minute of it. Each night, they drown their sorrows in Mezcal and fantasize about getting rich and moving to Australia.
So those are your choices: Free room and board at St. Bobblehead Hospice, or live a daily waking nightmare of sorrow, regret, and cheap Mexican booze. Yeah. Death, please.
Things change though, when one day Sissi heads to town to for groceries at the same time Bodo is doing the same, utilizing his Five Finger Discount card. Things go south for Bodo, who takes off running in about that general direction - causing a truck driver to swerve and run Sissi down like a prairie dog. Bodo finds her alive under the truck, but unable to breathe. Falling back on his Army skills, he performs an extremely realistic looking field tracheotomy and saves her life. He rides the gurney to the hospital with her long enough to ensure her safety before vanishing without a trace.
As she recovers, Sissi has an epiphany and realizes that her life…well…sucks. She becomes convinced that her meeting Bodo was more than luck; that they are two tortured souls whose shared existence will hold larger meaning than their lives apart. She begins to stalk… I mean, she tries to track him down, and turns out to be quite the detective for someone who spends most of her time with the least subtle people on earth. But Bodo is not what she expects, and his reaction to her is not what she'd hoped for. Yet their lives turn out to have more in common than either imagines, and like a couple of rogue planets, the more they pass, the faster they spiral toward one another.
It's a little dark, but there's an undercurrent of hope to all of this. Bodo is tortured by remorse, but that itself is a form of passion, and its something he secretly longs to share. Sissi's life is an endless hell of pointless drudgery, but the best thing you can take away from a brush with death is a determination to make your life mean something - and she does. Whether they end up together or not is less important than whether or not they realize the need to change - and this is the driver behind the film's almost dreamlike third act. The message is more important than the medium here and the story takes some pretty improbable leaps or logic in order to make its point.
But that's the beauty of surrealism; it doesn't NEED to be real. Life itself is basically one long struggle punctuated - hopefully - by extended periods of success and joy. We assign cosmic meaning to that joy because we all know what's waiting for us at the end. Maybe that meaning is real, and maybe it's not - but the mystery behind it is part of the adventure.
In real life we tend to lose more often than we win and even when we win, we sometimes give up so much that it feels like loss.
And so, we create art to explore these things. Just because you touch hands with someone reaching for the same cab doesn't mean you're meant to be together forever. Just because some jackass pulls a Hawkeye Pierce and saves your life after they get you run over by a bus doesn't mean they're your soul mate.
But what if they are? What if those moments really DO have some universal meaning? What if that really IS what life is all about? And if it happened to you, how far would you be willing to go to find out? And what the hell IS Fanta, anyway? That's the point of this film (except for the Fanta), and it is your own personal ratio of cockeyed optimist to miserable cynic that will determine how you feel about this strange, thought provoking film.