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Taking its cue from "Cinderella" but customising it for the modern world (the female is the active one who has to find the army jacket with the missing button), "The Princess and the Warrior" is about two lost souls who, grappling with their introspection and retreat from society, come across one another in a fairly startling circumstance. Having stolen food from a petrol station, Bodo is running from two employees and, nipping down alleys, into a shop and out the back door, he finally eludes them by hiding under a truck which has just run over a girl, Sissi. And that's how they meet.
Once she has tracked him down, they realise that they're both troubled oddballs and are thus united by their emptiness and sadness. Each has a face which is all but expressionless, blank even, and the challenge - to which Franka Potente and Benno Fürmann expertly rise - is to suggest insecurity, angst, and off-kilter thoughts while barely moving a facial muscle. They are, in other words, good enough actors to light up the screen with a stare.
As with director Tom Tykwer's previous picture, "Run Lola Run", there is no flab on this film. Powered by meaty scenes, whether they are built on surging drama or small observation, the picture also sports attractive, luminous photography which conveys the look of a dream. Quite right too, because the events themselves and their progress (the couple emerging from the city into a beautifully green wood, for example) are the very stuff of dreams. The eerie, tinkling music bolsters the effect.
A highly imaginative effort which is grounded in the reality of being disturbed, "The Princess and the Warrior" also reveals its originality, and the director's railway enthusiasm, by photographing Wuppertal's unique overhead railway from all angles. Sadly the trains were running too quickly for me to write down their numbers.
