Princesa Burro

Sometimes a film simply catches your attention – through a feeling, an instinct or an affinity with something you already know you love. I went to see Princesa Burro at the 79th edition of Locarno Film Festival because I have a soft spot for fairy tales. Its premise seemed to promise the familiar pleasures of the form: kings and curses, a princess, perhaps a prince and the possibility of a happily-ever-after. What I was not expecting was the whirlwind of contemporary themes into which Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña would throw all of these conventions.

Princesa Burro begins in the most familiar territory of the fairy tale: a king and queen in love, a mysterious witch, the birth of a daughter and a curse that brings a plague upon the kingdom. The king responds by banning love altogether. By establishing the initial status quo within the classical five-part fairy-tale narrative arc, the film gives us the comforting sense that we know what comes next.

This familiarity is paired with a remarkable visual world. Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña bring together animation, stop motion, collage, papier-mâché and live action to create something that feels entirely handmade. For me, there is also something nostalgically familiar in the way these techniques come together, recalling the strange novelty of films such as Joe Pytka’s Space Jam (1996), in which the collision of live action and animation seemed like a technological breakthrough in itself. Here, that collision produces the opposite effect: a throwback. And yet this return to a bygone visual language becomes novel again.

Diana, the king’s daughter, grows up inside this loveless kingdom, protected by her father and enclosed by his prohibition. When she comes of age, the conventional fairy tale seems to offer its solution. She could marry a prince, restore order and complete the familiar passage from daughter to wife. But for the next movement in the five-part narrative to begin, something fundamental has to break: Diana must violate the central rule of her world and fall in love.

Beyond this point, there is a break in the narration. Instead of proceeding through the quest, climax, falling action and resolution, the fairy tale becomes a loop of quests and climaxes. The medieval princess story suddenly gives way to a time-travelling universe in which the narrative keeps jumping between worlds, reconfiguring the same quest. The result is something like a horror daydream. Diana jumps into one world and then another, each altered but governed by recurring conditions. There is always some form of plague. There is always a choice to be made between her father and her lover. And there is always an encounter between life and death.

It would be easy to describe Princesa Burro as a story about a woman breaking with patriarchal convention, or as a contemporary revision of the princess narrative. But the film’s more interesting provocation is that Diana is not simply being asked to choose between obedience and freedom, or between a father and a lover. She is confronted with the expectation that these forms of attachment must be placed in opposition to each other at all. The conflict occurs precisely because Diana is not defined by the conventional markers of womanhood that the fairy tale, or even contemporary narratives, usually offers us. She is not being asked to become a mother. She is not being rewarded through marriage. Her struggle does not emerge from the familiar transition from girlhood to wifehood and motherhood. Instead, the film strips the question down to basics: how do you choose between the family you are born into and the family you might create when both are presented as if they cannot coexist, and when society’s most conventional understanding of family presumes precisely such a choice?

Diana’s dilemma may initially look like a distinctly feminine one, but there is something more universal and perhaps unexpectedly masculine about its structure. The question of whether one can belong simultaneously to one’s family and to the person one chooses to build a life with is hardly unique to women. Yet cinema has dramatised this conflict through a familiar division of roles: the daughter eventually leaves, the wife takes her place and the initial family becomes something that must be outgrown.

This is perhaps why the film’s formal instability feels so closely connected to its subject. The narrative cannot resolve itself because the categories it has inherited cannot accommodate Diana’s desire. So the quest loops, fails and restarts, repeatedly returning to the same contradiction. Princesa Burro begins with the simple architecture of a fairy tale and gradually transforms it into an equally simple but much more difficult question: how can our most basic needs coexist when the worlds we inherit insist that we choose between them?