The Princess and the Warrior

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * )

The writer/director and actor responsible for the hyperkinetic and perfectly wrought Run Lola Run (a film so obsessively singleminded it told and retold the same headlong story) here tell a layered and contemplative tale about coincidence and predestination, a sort of urban fairytale in which happy-ever-after is the last thing on their minds.

The result is a strange concoction, by turns affecting, disquieting and faintly absurd, that prefers stylistic bravura to narrative coherence and which, despite its pretensions of originality, is in the end rather old-fashioned and plodding.

Set in Tykwer's hometown of Wuppertal, the story concerns Simone, aka Sissi (Potente), a psychiatric nurse whose life intersects suddenly and miraculously with that of an ex-soldier Bodo (Furmann) when she is run down by a truck.

In a scene that evokes with eerie, erotically charged potency the experience of near-death, he rescues her and promptly disappears, leaving only a jacket button clutched in her clenched fist.

Sissi tries to track down and befriend Bodo. She believes they are meant for each other and he, for reasons that emerge only slowly, thinks he's meant for no one so does his best to shake her off. But the twisting, turning contrivances of a plot that - whatever its faults - never fails to hold the attention, ensure they will have plenty to do with each other.

Tykwer is in ferociously inventive mode here, although his plot line alternates frantic activity with languorous passages that verge on the boring.

The central relationship is problematic, too: Furmann, who recalls a young Brando, has a certain dangerously smouldering charm, but his interior life remains more mysterious than it needs to be.

And Potente is an oddly lumpen and unromantic heroine. We have no trouble understanding why she appeals to her charges at work (the film reproduces the jittery, random world of the psychiatric ward with commendable precision), but with her hair sternly pinned and her unsmiling face, she never gets us on side.

In the end, The Princess and The Warrior's characters are searching for meaning amid the clutter of circumstance and burdened by the baggage of their past. But this odd mixture of the banal and the self-consciously enigmatic enthrals and entertains only sporadically - and never does both at the same time.

Cast: Franka Potente, Benno Furmann, Joachim Krol

Director: Tom Tykwer

Running time: 130 mins

Rating: M (content may disturb)

Screening: Rialto from Thursday