Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

(aka The Princess and The Warrior)

I wonder if Tom Tykwer, a native of the town of Wuppertal, was always aware of its fairy-tale potential. Viewed from the space-cam, the entire town looks like it was assembled out of miniatures. It has an overhead suspension railway with pastel colors and an amusement park appearance. The town is very long and very narrow - the perfect setting for a long, encompassing helicopter shot.

Whether Tykwer has planned it from his childhood, I don't know, but he made it the setting for this modern day fairy tale about two very sad, lonely people who are destined to be pushed together by fate.

Sissi is a beloved nurse in a psychiatric hospital and, we are told, she was born there, the daughter of two patients. She doesn't seem to get away much, but if she is unhappy, she is unaware of it. She is not really capable of happiness of unhappiness. She's sleepwalking through life, willing to do almost anything to ease the suffering of her patients, but seeming to be in a trance as she does it. She even masturbates a patient to sleep, remaining dutiful but uninvolved. On a rare visit to town, escorting a blind patient, Sissi is run over by a truck, and suddenly finds herself under the vehicle, gasping for breath. Her accident was caused by a petty crime committed by a man named Bodo, who also comes to her rescue, and performs an emergency tracheotomy on her.

Chance is operating here on all cylinders. It was chance that Bodo caused the truck to take actions that would run Sissi over. It was a completely separate circumstance that placed him under the truck later. He was hiding from authorities, only to spot a dying woman there, unaware that she was dying because of him.

Up to that point, the film operates in a grim world which mirrors our reality. Although it sometimes looks like they live in a fairy tale setting, Sissi and Bodo never smile. The streets are congested and noisy, Sissi's patients are depressing and often hyperactive, Bodo's life seems almost completely hopeless (he's fired from his job as a gravedigger - for crying on the job), his flight from the pursuers seems desperate and frantic. The tracheotomy itself is one of the most intense screen experiences you will ever see, and (as her narration reveals) it is also a vicarious sexual experience for Sissi. And an awakening.

After that moment, the movie changes. The frantic tone disappears and it takes on a magical, mystical, languorous dream-like quality.

Sissi could breathe again, literally and figuratively. Her doctors said that her survival from such an accident was a miracle itself, but her complete recovery was magic. But she couldn't return to her old life. She had to find the fairy-tale warrior who gave her back her life, and who woke her from her lifelong sleep. She sensed that he was her healer, for her psychological pain as well as her injuries.

A fully-recovered Sissi later returned to the spot where she was run over, accompanied by the same blind man. Although it is the same spot and appears to be the same time of day as before, the city is deserted. There are no pedestrians. There are no moving cars. The blind man is no longer a disturbed blind man, but now has gained some kind of supernatural powers, and is able to pinpoint the exact storefront from which Sissi's savior had emerged so long ago, on the day of the accident. Sissi herself has acquired supernatural powers and is subsequently able to help her warrior escape from a bank robbery by simply walking up the police officer and taking his gun away willingly. By the way, minutes after the bank alarm went off, that one police officer was down in the vault with a little handgun, and no back-up emerged. For all he knew, there could have been fifty guys down there, all armed with AK-47's, but he just walked down the stars with his pea shooter. The entire bank vault area, narrow and white, had an unearthly quality.

There is plenty more in the way of offbeat development.

• Sissi repeats again and again that her mother is dead, this implying that her father is still alive, and probably still a patient at the mental ward. Which patient is he? Does Sissi know this? How will it affect the story?
• Bodo wears his mantle of sadness because his wife died in a gas station explosion while he was sitting on the toilet. His brother keeps telling him that someday he'll have to get off that toilet. How will he do it?

I don't know what the hell the last twenty minutes were all about. I knew that Bodo had to get back symbolically to the gas station where his wife died, and when he left, the man who would leave that station had to be the man that walked in, years ago, before his wife died. But the way they carried this out was ripped straight out of The Twilight Zone, and I still don't know what was supposed to be real and what wasn't. And if it wasn't real, I don't know whose mind it was in. As I mentioned, some of it was pure symbolism, presented side-by-side with reality. Strange stuff.

I have to confess that I really liked this movie, although I didn't know what the hell was going on half the time, but for you to like it you'll have to understand that

1. it is deliberately vague, opaque, sad, and mysterious, and the musical score supports that continuously melancholy, spooky mood.
2. it doesn't follow the natural laws of the universe
3. it offers supernatural, magic, and symbols matter-of-factly, without explanation, intertwined with reality
4. almost everyone whispers and mumbles almost all the time, as if sharing a secret, even characters whom we would expect to be loudmouths. It's as if every part were played, with typical breathlessness, by Nastassja Kinski.
5. the film is 130 minutes long and seems longer, because much of it is wordless, and the pace is meant to be deliberate and dreamlike in the second half

Does Germany have more directors like Tykwer lying in wait, waiting to spring into the international market? If so, it might turn out to be a helluva decade for German cinema.