The Princess and the Warrior (2000)
The Princess and the Warrior (2000) directed by Tom Tykwer
This is not a particularly good movie. The plot relies on outrageous coincidences (the more you reflect on the scenes, the more you realize this), the male lead is sappy and driven by a corny trauma in his past, and the movie’s ending is overworked, overlong, and fantastical in an unsatisfying way.
Still, I’m recommending the movie, based solely on the performance of Franka Potente.
Franka Potente’s face is an enigma. There’s something slightly unpolished about it. Her jaw seems heavy, and she’s a bit of a mouth-breather — though not in an ugly way; rather, it’s as if she carries her emotions in her mouth, and they keep welling up, spilling over into her other features. Her eyes are equally fascinating. The outer parts of her lids bulge, giving a hard line above the eyes and lending them an aspect somewhere between a scowl and a flinch. She seems at once tough and vulnerable.
You won’t notice any of this in press photos. If you do a google image search, you’ll see her as just another pretty smiling face. Only in her acting, and certainly in this movie, do you see her “in vivo” face — in which she carries a full load of emotions in her mouth.
Every time something happens to her, you watch in fascination as her face swarms like lemmings near a cliff edge. You’re never completely certain what she’s feeling or how she might react. With her many-nuanced face, she can project multiple emotions at once: vulnerability, menace, weakness, strength, curiosity, hope, world-weariness, determination, despair–
Director Tom Tykwer chooses to linger on her face, using lengthy close-ups, and while you’d expect to tire of this, I didn’t. (The director attempts the same thing with the male lead, Benno Furmann, but Benno delivers an unvarying moist bulging gape that merely grows annoying.)
How do I rate the film? Well, it has many strong performances (the supporting cast is solid), but the plot is terribly contrived, full of implausibilities — and like I said, the ending dragged and failed to satisfy. It really deserves a passing grade at most. Still, on the strength of Franka Potente’s performance alone, I will strongly recommend it — and I have to give director Tom Tykwer full credit for realizing that, yes, you can build a movie around Franka Potente’s face.
Let’s call this one a guilty pleasure.