Yesterday Girls: Prinzessin (2006)

Alison Butler

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.