Princess Arete Reviews

Positively lovely to look at, blissfully quiet for long stretches, and wonderfully feminist, Princess Arete should have been a slam dunk, an underrated classic just waiting for rediscovery. It was not to be, as the pacing drags all over the place, like a theme park ride that comes to a screaming halt before whiplashing you this way and that along the track before coming to a slightly unsatisfying end.

For a long stretch in the opening, Princess Arete is arresting in its slow unraveling. We meet the young princess, held captive in the castle by a neurotic father after her mother’s death. His overprotective nature has made his daughter an inadvertent prisoner, and she feels like she’s slowly suffocating with her lone escape being in the books she cherishes. The princess becomes the smartest person in the room, capable of calling her potential suitors on their lies and exaggerations to win her favor.

Her perceptive nature and belief in her worth beyond marriageability and book smarts mark her as a rebel, and when a wizard turns her into a somnambulist princess many in the royal court declare her a proper royal now. Everything up to her transformation and kidnapping by the wizard is intriguing, especially a scene of the magic gifts the king has requested to win her hand. The pacing is deliberate but never boring.

This slow unfurling makes promises of grander things that never come to fruition, and once we’re transported to the wizard’s castle the pacing grinds to an agonizing halt. It’s here that the 105 minutes of the running time become interminable as the film cannot decide what it wants to do with the magic in the story, whether the wizard should be feared, pitied, or a combination of the two, and the stakes are mentioned being elevated but quickly deflate as time goes on.

The wizard fears that Arete is the chosen one of the prophecy to kill him, and his transformation of her into a simple-minded princess is a way to take out her threat. Except Arete is not interested in revenge once she switches back, only escape. Not just from the wizard’s child-like tyranny, but from the oppressive patriarchy of her royal station and forced marriage as she refuses to be a commodity. Even a magic ring promising three wishes, something of a Chekov’s gun that never fires, is routinely brought up only to be tossed aside.

When the transformed princess tells herself a story, the origin story of her original/true form it turns out, she mentions that a fairy tale without a witch or a dragon is boring. This becomes an unintentional bit of self-appraisal. It’s not that Princess Arete needed a witch or a dragon to be interesting, but it needed something larger at play, some semblance of narrative and emotional stakes that will eventually pay off. As it is, it plays like a slightly, frustratingly limp variation of Hayao Miyazaki’s work.

Thankfully things pick back up once she reverts back to her normal form, destroys his castle, and helps the denizens of the neighboring village. Arete’s deep empathy and yearning for adventure are finally given full bloom in these moments, and you want to scream in frustration for the interminable nature of the second act for sinking the strengths of the beginning and climax. Then the final moments show Arete out in the world, ending on an ellipsis when a period would better served the story. That’s the problem with Princess Arete, she’s a fascinating character stranded in a narrative that doesn’t deserve correctly service her.