| WINTER SLEEPERS Director: Tom Tykwer Tom Tykwer came virtually out of no where last year with his arcade game style hit Run Lola Run but it’s obvious that with his latest film Winter Sleepers -- which was actually made prior to Lola -- he has plenty of talent. By itself Winter Sleepers isn’t too bad, but unfortunately it can’t help but be compared to Run Lola Run and, no doubt, many will enthusiastically approach it thinking they are going to see the same type of film. They’re are some similarities between the two: Like Lola, Winter Sleepers starts with a swift pace using a swooping steady cam shot set to a techno beat. And the scenes introducing the characters have a similar pace but the film soon slows down into a long drawn-out drama. The film is set in a snowy mountain village and consists of five characters who walk around in a daze. Similar to Run Lola Run it deals with the fate of characters and the serendipitous connections they have with one another and the way one minor change in the winds can alter someone’s destiny. The five are Rene (Ulrich Matthes), Marco (Heino Ferch), Rebecca (Floraine Daniel), Laura (Marie-Lou Sellem) and Theo (Joseph Bierbichler). Rene, a petty thief who works as 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. Theo -- a farmer who is driving the truck Rene encouters -- 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. The character connections areconvoluted and soap operatic in their dimensions: Rene (the projectionist) happens to be friends with Marco (the skier) who is dating Rebecca (the blonde) who is roommates with Laura (the brunette) who happens to be the nurse of the girl in the coma. The twist is that, as chance would have it, Rene (who’s clueless to everything that happened beyond yesterday) starts dating Laura (who thinks his memory lapses are cute). On paper the concept is brilliant but Tykwer doesn’t develop the characters very well and he spends way too much time on the movie’s two minor characters, Marco and Rebecca, who constantly bicker and add nothing to the narrative other than a headache for viewers. Twyker (with help from cinematographer Frank Grieb and editor Katja Dringenberg) is a director with real autuer status. He has plenty of cinematic tricks up his sleeve and he enjoys twisting the narrative into a delectable knot with modest philosophical overtones. Even though the film goes on way too long (forty minutes longer than the crisp Lola) it is worth hanging around to see how everything resolves itself in the end. - Matt Langdon |