*** 1/2 out of ****
December 11, 2001

BY ADAM KEMPENAAR

German filmmaker Tom Tykwer's superb breakthrough film, Run Lola Run, combined thumping techno music, flashy editing, and a fractured, frenetic storyline to overload the senses. Tykwer's followup, The Princess and the Warrior, doesn't try to assault the senses so much as it endeavors to engage them - to compel its characters, and, by extension, the audience, to connect with the sights, sounds, and smells that surround them.

Consider the crucial scene near the beginning where Sissi, a nurse at a mental hospital played by the dazzling star of Run Lola Run, Franka Potente, is hit by a truck while crossing the street. When she awakes after briefly being knocked unconscious, the first thing she notices is the silence. "Actually, I always liked silence," her voice-over explains. "But not this silence. Something was missing. My…breath. Help!"

Miraculously, Sissi's plea is answered when a former soldier named Bodo (Benno Furmann) saves her life. I'll refrain from explaining exactly how he does it because that would spoil some of the suspense. Suffice it to say that anyone who has seen Atom Egoyan's brilliant film The Sweet Hereafter, or read Russell Banks' novel, will have some idea where the scene is going.

But even more intriguing than Bodo's heroics is Tykwer's attention to detail, and his heightened awareness of the senses. When Bodo leaves her for a moment, Sissi notices that her bottom itches. "I thought maybe I'd never be able to scratch myself again," she laments. The sound of silence, the desire to touch, and then smell - "I wish I could have told the man that his sweat smelled tasty. I guess he'd been sucking on a peppermint drop beforehand."

You can physically recover from such an accident, but can your life ever return to how it was before? For Sissi, everything has changed. "I come back and everybody's here, and I'm afraid that nothing will be the same as it was before," she tells one of her patients. "No, you're afraid that everything will be the same," he explains. He's right, of course. A traumatic event such as the one Sissi has survived shatters any illusions of her previous happiness. It's not that she really wants things to be the same as they were before; she wants - needs - her life to be different.

At night she dreams of her rescuer, and she successfully seeks him out living with his brother Walter. We learn that Bodo has his own emotional problems to deal with since his wife died. We also discover that the pair is planning to rob a bank and leave for Australia. Bodo doesn't want Sissi in his life, but the two are brought together to redeem each other through a confluence of chance and circumstance, a series of coincidences that raises many of the same questions about fate and destiny that Tykwer examined previously in Run Lola Run, and handles here with the sensitivity of a Paul Auster novel.

Arguably, Tykwer draws the film's conclusion out a bit too long, tacking on what is probably an unnecessary plot revelation about a crime that had been committed in the mental hospital. But whether he's bombarding us with style, or subtly provoking our senses, The Princess and the Warrior solidifies Tykwer's status as one of today's preeminent, young European filmmakers, who with every film will find new ways to extract meaning from the simple mysteries of everyday life and fate and love.