Yesterday
Girls: Prinzessin (2006)
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The
motif of the female wanderer has a long history in modern cinema, appearing in
films as diverse as Rossellini’s Journey
in Italy (1954), Malle’s Lift to the
Scaffold (1958), Kluge’s Yesterday
Girl (1966), Sanders-Brahms’ No
Mercy, No Future (1981), Varda’s Vagabond (1985), Despente & Trinh-Thi’s Baise-Moi (2000) and Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (Ramsay, 2002). A variant on the Deleuzian mutant, wandering
in any-space-whatever, seeing rather than doing, these characters are
bellwethers, playing on conventional aspects of female characterisation - the
self with weak or permeable boundaries, the opaque or passive object, the
allegorical figure, the embodied sensorium – to register the state of things. For male auteurs, the first generation of women wanderers expressed the loss of
moral certainties after WW2 and the erosion of patriarchal authority. With the
emergence of female auteurs in the feminist 1980s, they turned Orphic, plumbing
the depths of the Symbolic, crashing and burning in schizoid breakdown or
nihilistic abjection. In contemporary Europe, where female experience is
characterised by post-feminist ‘choice’ and free market necessity, and where
female mobility can mean anything from drunken hen nights in Prague to the
trafficking of women into involuntary prostitution, the latest versions of the
wandering woman motif are characterised by performative violence and fluid
reversals of position between victor and victim.
Birgit
Grosskopf’s first feature Prinzessin (Princesses, Germany, 2006 – not to
be confused with the contemporaneous Spanish production Princesas, 2005) crosses two strains of this tradition: her
wanderers are plural, comrades in arms, as in Baise-moi, and they are girls, not women, poised rebelliously on
the brink of surrendering the androgynous freedoms of childhood. Bad girls go
everywhere, as the song says ... but where is there to go? Grosskopf says: ‘My
protagonists look for ways of rebelling with physical force against the
desolation and despair that surrounds them. Like any good character, they want
to escape. Only where to?’
Grosskopf, a graduate of the Deutsche Film
und Fernsehakademie Berlin, has been described as a member of the Berlin
School. She shares an austere stylised realism with other directors in the
school. The princesses of the title are a girl gang, three rough but pretty
teenagers and a disconcertingly sophisticated pre-adolescent girl, drifting
around the tower blocks and shopping malls of suburban Cologne. Grosskopf’s camera
tracks and circles them when they’re on the move and contemplates them in
carefully framed static long shots when they’re not. Occasional passages of
disjointed or elliptical editing hint at an aesthetic that is more expressive
than realistic, but the most stylised aspect of the film is its mise en scène, which
is constrained to a wintry palette of dirty whites and greys, barely
illuminated by a dim midwinter sky. It is ‘a film like an ice age’, as an
awards jury commented, though its coldness derives more from the milieu than
from the gaze of the camera, which departs from the ethnological stare of the
Berlin school to enter into sensuous intimacy with the characters.
The film’s opening sequence establishes
its method. The girls are taking a local train. Bored, they pass the time
aimlessly in mildly antisocial behaviour, one humming loudly and another
swinging from a bar. Annoyed by the tinny sound from a girl passenger’s MP3
player, Yvonne (Yvonne Miller) punches the girl in the face - twice. Katharina
(Irina Potapenko) sympathetically hands the girl a tissue to wipe her bloodied
nose, then, with a soft smile, says ‘I’ll miss you, Yvonne’. Naturalistic sound
gives way to a classical choral solo, as if following Pasolini’s principle of
artistic ‘contamination’.
Violence is presented as part of the
milieu inhabited by the characters. ‘Use violence or you’ll never be taken
seriously’, one of them says. In the days around New Year’s Eve, firecrackers
explode every couple of seconds, making the characters jump. ‘Are we in Iraq or
what?’ someone shouts. The impression of a war zone is reinforced by military
jets and helicopters passing overhead and a minor character who enlists to
fight in Afghanistan. As soon as Yvonne finds a gun among her stepfather’s things,
it is clear that it will be fired at some point. Violence is codified and
exceeds codification: a Turkish acquaintance, Özlem (Neshe Demir),
has insulted Katharina, and is due a beating, to
which she appears to have consented. But Katharina loses control and kicks the
shit out of her. In revenge for this, Özlem’s gang corners Yvonne in an
underpass (a claustrophobic and metaphorically rich setting). As Özlem
repeatedly slaps Yvonne, the camera turns away from the humiliating spectacle,
moves full circle around the underpass, and returns only to witness the
escalation of the attack, as Yvonne is spat at, punched and stabbed. She pulls
the gun from her jacket and shoots at the least aggressive girl in Özlem’s
gang, then staggers to her feet to finish the job with a second shot.
Grosskopf’s handling of violence owes much to Hollywood, particularly the
technique of shocking escalation ‘just when you thought it was all over’, but
there is also a realist emphasis on the consequences of violence that makes it more
corporeal than most Hollywood violence. The characters are visibly bruised and
battered, and their conversations about the body, when not luridly sexual,
figure the body traumatically broken into pieces, as when they discuss rumours
of lost body parts from tower block suicides.
The film’s poetry comes from a movement beyond
ordinary violence to extraordinary violence, from normal to extreme corporeal
experience. At the outset, the girl gang inhabits an organised substratum of
society characterised by systematic and reciprocal violence and abuse. Yvonne
drops out of this system, first by failing to report to serve a jail term, then
by using the gun; Katharina does so by attacking Özlem so violently, and by
outraging the Russian émigré community to which her family belongs. Like two
magnetic poles, Yvonne and Katharina attract and repel each other: the former
blonde, delicate, vicious and unloved, the latter dark, beautiful, voluptuous
and impulsive. The physicality of Miller and Potapenko’s performances drives
the film: Princesses is not about
violence per se, it is about the
embodied experience of rebelling against an environment which offers no scope
for effective action. The final scene, after Yvonne has been shot dead by the
police, shows Yvonne and Katharina on a train, as in the opening scene: two
friends, in a luminous moment, suspended outside time, in the moment between
futile perception and fatal action.
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© Alison Butler and Rouge February 2009. |
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