In `Run, Lola, Run,' German director Tom Tykwer gave us a frenetic lightning bolt of a film about a woman given just 20 minutes to save her boyfriend's life. In `Winter Sleepers,' he performs another miracle of pacing, slowing things down to a heartbeat. Only a director at the top of his craft could so masterfully integrate music, dialogue, and cinematography into a unified vision of lives entangled by love, death, and fate. Rebecca. Marco. Rene. Laura. Theo. The first four are young and aimless. The last is desperately seeking to save his daughter's life following a horrifying car crash on a winter road. But as chance throws them together, what they don't know about each other is what makes `Winter Sleepers' so relentlessly fascinating. When the handsome ski instructor Marco absent-mindedly leaves his keys in his car in order to get Rebecca in bed, Rene impulsively takes the car for a spin. He slams into Theo, sending the farmer's daughter into a coma. But the car goes into a snowbank, leaving the two drivers amnesiac and no one to blame unless one of the two recovers his memory. Around this plot, Tykwer works wonders. Lovers' quarrels, strangers' encounters, remorse, jealousy, confusion, infidelity all surface in these five lives. As the characters come together, each scene is a masterpiece of brevity and revelation. Each moment further enmeshes the five in their shared fates. Although the ski town's hottest hangout is called the `Sleepers Bar,' the sleeping here is entirely metaphorical. Two generations of Germans collide and only one - the elder represented by the grieving Theo -- has more than a Deutsche mark of meaning in his life. The others, having chosen surface over sincerity and freedom in lieu of commitment, are sleeping their lives away. Despite the cultural gaps, the sleepers seem eerily like people we know. Marco is impulsive and hot wired. Rene, lonely and lost, squanders his talent while working as a projectionist. Laura is a gentle nurse moonlighting as an actress. Her friend Rebecca is coasting through life on her beauty. Yet unlike modern American films about slackers, Tykwer doesn't mock. The problems of these sleepers are very real; their malaise is deeply felt. The film's lone flaw is its highly unlikely ending. After so skillfully blending coincidence with character, Tykwer stretches chance a little too far. Not even Dickens would have dared such a meeting on a mountain slope. Yet the end does not ruin the means, and the means of this movie make it one of the best films you'll see this year. In one of the film's typically cryptic scenes, Rene and Laura trade adjectives to describe each other. Frustrated, inhibited, egocentric... While these words fit the characters, the only adjectives to describe `Winter Sleepers' itself are brilliant, disturbing, powerful, and haunting.
Review of Winter Sleepers
