Winter Sleepers

ultra magnus

If you've heard of German filmmaker Tom Tykwer at all, it's because you've seen Run Lola Run. I had an opporunity last night, however, to see his film from 1997, Winter Sleepers. While the two films have very little in common, it is obvious from the get-go that Tykwer is a visual master. I could easily imagine this being shown in cinematography and director's courses all across the country.

Like Lola, Winter Sleepers starts with a swift pace using a steady cam shot that swoops over a snowy forest floor set to a techno beat. (It should be mentioned that Tykwer's use of sound to produce tension is second to none.) And the scenes introducing the characters have a similar pace but the film soon slows down into a drawn-out drama.

Winter Sleepers is set in a snowy mountain village and consists of five characters who are really not all that compelling, but Tykwer forces you to be interested. Similar to Run Lola Run, it deals with the fate and blind chance. One seemingly minor action by a character can have an effect on many. The five main characters are Rene (Ulrich Matthes), Marco (Heino Ferch), Rebecca (Floraine Daniel), Laura (Marie-Lou Sellem) and Theo (Joseph Bierbichler).

Rene, a movie theater projectionist in a German village, steals his friend Marco’s car one winter evening and while attempting to avoid a head on with a truck launches it off the road into a snow bank twenty feet off of the highway. He survives, entirely forgets the experience (because of a war wound that has fried his short-term memory) and unwittingly sets off a chain of events that ripple through everyone’s life all the way until the end of the movie. A very nice touch, however, is that we don't know this guy has no short term memory until much later. We are left to wonder for the majority of the movie exactly what his deal is. Theo, the farmer driving the truck, survives but his daughter is thrown from the truck and ends up in a coma. The distraught farmer spends the rest of the movie vengefully in search of the culprit who put his family in such a predicament.

All in all, it's a good movie, even if I dare say...pointless? I don't know. It's just hard for me to imagine somebody sitting down to a write a movie like this. It's almost like this was merely a directing exercise for Tykwer, and the story is completely incidental. But, by and large, it does keep you interested.

The film goes on too long (forty minutes longer than the frenetic Lola), but it is worth hanging around to see how everything resolves itself in the end.