Winter Sleepers

Germany/France 1997

Reviewed by Richard Falcon

Synopsis

Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.

At a a remote Berchtesgaden villa in the mountains, Rebecca, a young translator, meets her ski-instructor boyfriend Marco. They impulsively go off to have sex, so he leaves the keys to his car in the ignition. Rene, a projectionist at Sleepers, the local cinema and bar, happens past the window, photographs the couple making love and takes the car for a ride. Rene crashes into local farmer Theo and his family, gravely injuring Theo's young daughter. He stumbles off without helping them, but takes photographs first. The villa's owner Laura, also a nurse, assists in the operation on Theo's daughter. Unable to find Marco's snow-covered car, the police disbelieve Theo's story about a second driver. Laura encounters Rene in Sleepers and a relationship develops. Marco and Rebecca have a row about Rebecca only wanting him for sex, even though he's having an affair in the city and begins a fling with ski-student Nina. Rene explains to Laura he's suffering from short-term memory loss after having been blown up by a grenade. He takes photographs to compensate.

Laura invites Rene to the villa, but he fails to recognise it, while Marco becomes increasingly jealous of Rebecca's attraction to the newcomer. Rene discovers the insurance claim for Marco's car and the photograph causes him to search in vain through his own photographs for clues. Theo finds the car and discovers Marco's driving licence inside. Believing Marco is the hit-and-run driver, Theo sets his dog on Marco who skies to his death down a crevasse. Laura, pregnant, settles down with Rene and Rebecca returns to the city.

Review

Soon to be better known in the UK for his upcoming, critically acclaimed Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer describes this follow up to his successful 1994 debut Deadly Maria/Die tödliche Maria as a 'Liebesthriller'. It opens in rapid thriller style, each character introduced with a typewritten caption as he or she journeys by train and road into the snowy mountains. Twyker's own rhythmic music enhances the widescreen images of the mountainscapes as we're further seduced by the film's bravura visuals including match cuts between a close-up gash in Rebecca's thumb and the vertiginous mountain crevasse into which Marco will later plunge, dizzying 360-degree pans around Rene's head, and a shower stream hitting a bather's head horizontally across the frame. For much of the film's early reels this style keeps us hooked while Tykwer defers explaining Rene's memory loss.

Like Wolfgang Becker's Life Is All You Get (for which Tykwer wrote the screenplay) Winterschläfer aspires also to being a portrait of Twyker's own generation of people in their early thirties. Both couples are in hiding - if not hibernation - rootless and without ambition or drive. Tykwer uses the time bought by his elliptical narrative not just to exercise his stylistic muscle but also (less successfully) to compare and contrast the two relationships on display, which play out in the villa's cocoon-like interior. Rebecca and Marco's is based on sex and it is her frantic seduction of him that makes his car an open temptation to Rene. Rebecca is colour-coded red - from the drop of blood on her finger, to almost every piece of clothing, down to her underwear. Her physicality is stressed throughout, underscored by moments when she masturbates or pulls down her red tights to urinate in the snow.

Other characters are similarly coded. Marco, her lover, is dressed shades of blue. This overelaborate design and stylistic excess suggests Tykwer doesn't trust his essentially self-centred characters to interest us and there's an undeniable callousness in the movie's treatment of Rebecca. Laura's and Rene's relationship is based on their strangeness to each other and on the film's central mystery. Their relationship ought to survive since short-term memory loss is probably an asset in keeping shallow characters such as these interested in one another.

Winterschläfer seems to be suggesting Rene's condition could be a metaphor for his lost generation. Tykwer was a Berlin repertory cinema programmer and made television documentaries on Lars von Trier, Peter Greenaway and Wim Wenders among others. In the Wenders' Alice in the Cities (1974), the idea of a German in his early 30s trying and failing to grasp and order experiences through Polaroids becomes a resonant image of the dislocation of the immediate postwar generation. But as with von Trier's work, this European film heritage is both appropriated and surrounded by self-regarding stylistic prowess. Rene's memory loss is due to an accident with a practice grenade, not the ontological crisis of a 70s Wenders' hero. Like the Berchtesgaden setting, this narrative expedient offers a distant echo of the past, which is perhaps appropriate for the generation Tykwer is describing, if not exactly intellectually captivating.

The film works better as spectacle, best viewed without much thought. What, for example, is the terrific Josef Bierbichler - veteran of the anarchic 'anti-Heimatfilme' of Herbert Achternbusch - doing here playing the kind of Bavarian rustic common to so many traditional Heimatfilm? What Winterschläfer finally turns on is awakening its directionless characters to the fates they are rushing towards in the opening sequence. Marco's final ecstatically filmed plunge into a crevasse echoes the intervention of Romantic Destiny in Weimar cinema, described by Siegfried Kracauer as, "no mere accident but a majestic event that stirred metaphysical shudders in sufferers and witnesses alike." But the particular "majestic event" which climaxes this stylish but superficial film is prefaced by a lap dissolve which has Marco skiing towards Rebecca's huge red mouth, an image more befitting of a Bond-film title sequence.

Credits

Producer
Stefan Arndt
Screenplay
Tom Tykwer
Anne-Françoise Pyszora
Based on the novel Expense of the Spirit by
Anne-Françoise Pyszora
Director of Photography
Frank Griebe
Editor
Katja Dringenberg
Art Director
Alexander Manasse
Music
Reinhold Heil
Johnny Klimek
Tom Tykwer
©X Filme creative pool Gmbh, Berlin
Production Companies
X Filme creative Pool in association with Filmstiftung NRW/FilmFernsehFonds
Bayern/Palladio Film/WDR/MDR/arte and BMI present an X Filme creative pool Gmbh with Palladio Film/Westdeutschen Rundfunk WDR/ Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk MDR/ arte co-production with Filmstiftung NR/FilmFernsehFonds Bayern/ Bundesministerium des Innern
Location Producer
Tom Tykwer
Commissioning Editors
WDR:
Gebhard Henke
MDR:
Nicole Kellerhals
Sabine Manthey
ARTE:
Andreas Schreitmüller
Production Supervisor
Maria Köpf
Production Manager
Milanka Comfort
Unit Production Managers
Ralph Remstedt
Set:
Torsten Künstler
Additional:
Ralph von Strachwitz
Ski/Freefall Stunt Unit:
Stefan Seitz
Production Consultant
Gerhard von Halem
Assistant Directors
Sebastian Fahr
Tanja Däberitz
Script Supervisor
Ulrike Schmidt
Casting
An Dorthe Braker
2nd Unit Directors of Photography
Gregor Schnitzler
Constantin Kesting
Camera Operators
Freefall Stunt Unit:
Willy Boeykens
Andy Duff
Skiing Stunt Unit:
Tomas Erhart
Henning Jessel
Sebastian Fahr
Paraglide:
Christoph Frutiger
Helicopter:
Frank Griebe
Steadicam Operators
Ricardo Brunner
Daniel Koppelkamm
Michael Klausen
Digital Special Effects
Das Werk
Special Effects Supervisor:
Thomas Tannenberger
Digital Artists:
George Maihöfer
Christian Künstler
3D Computer Animation - Softimage:
Doug Philip
3D Computer Animation - Alias:
Stephan Osterburg
Production Manager:
Manfred Büttner
Domino Scanning/ Recording/Titles:
Andreas Schellenberg
Graphics Artist:
Claudius Schulz
Digital Retouching:
Iris Lengauer
Domino Scanning/Recording:
Nastuh Abootalebi
Matte Artist
Joachim Schulz
Special Effects
Heinz Ludwig
Snow Effects
Harry Wiessenhaan
Heinz Ludwig
Bergvilla Art Director
Uli Hanisch
Costume Designer
Aphrodite Kondos
Costume Supervisor
Florian Bayerl
Wardrobe
Elena Wegner
Make-up
Margrit Neufink
Jekaterina Oertel
Ski/Freefall Stunt Unit:
Frank Neumann
Opening Title Sequence
Das Werk
End Titles
Thomas Wilk
Songs
Babyloon:
Jovanka von Willsdorf
Reinhold Heil
Johnny Klimek
Soundtrack
"Untitled #1" by Josh Haden, performed by Spain; "Desert Equations" from "Made to Measure Vol. 8" by Richard Horowitz, performed by Sussan Deihim, Richard Horowitz; "Fratres" by Arvo Pärt, "For Piano and Violin" from "Tabula Rasa" by Arvo Pärt, performed by Gidon Kremer, Keith Jarrett; "For Strings and Percussion", "For Eight Cellos" by Arvo Pärt, performed by I Fiamminghi, Rudolf Werthen; "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" from "Tabula Rasa" by Arvo Pärt, performed by the Staatsorchester Stuttgart; "Tourtour" from "Struggle for Pleasure" by Wim Mertens; "No Plans No Projects" from "Educes Me" by Wim Mertens
Sound Design
Matthias Lempert
Dirk Jacob
Production Mixer
Arno Wilms
Sound Re-recording
Matthias Lempert
Sound Editor
Antje Zynga
Sound Effects
Joern Poetzl
Sound Effects Recordist
Christian Iserner
Sound Effects Editor
Andreas Völzing
Technical Adviser
Herr Holler
Skiing Trainer
Herbert Wendlinger
Stunt Co-ordinators
Ski/Freefall Stunt Unit:
François Doge
Car/Tree Stunt Unit:
Volkhart Buff
Dog Handler
Tiertraining-Filmtiere Simbeck
Pilots
Helicopter:
Theo von Atzigen
Paraglide:
Peter Bühler
Film Extract
Die toten Augen von London (1961)
Cast
Floriane Daniel
Rebecca
Heino Ferch
Marco
Ulrich Matthes
Rene
Marie-Lou Sellem
Laura
Laura Tonke
Nina
Sebastian Schipper
Otto
Agathe Taffertshofer
Edith, Theo's wife
Sofia Dirscherl
Marita, Theo's daughter
Robert Meyer
Keibl, cop
Werner Schnitzer
senior consultant
Saskia Vester
Anna
Josef Bierbichler
Theo
Simon Donatz
Jakob Donatz
Theo's sons
Harry Täschner
bailiff
Walter Anichhofer
prompter
Martin Leutgeb
2nd cop
Melanie Palmberger
Michaela Prähauser
Nina's friends
Peter Arp
man at accident
Caroline Richards
bartender
Swantje Matthaei
Alexa
Noushin Diehl
the baby
Anne-Françoise Pyszora
kitsch storyteller
René Schoenenberger
Gerd
Linda Schmidt
Rene's mother
Erdmann von Garnier
Rene's father
Felicitas Jeschke
Marco's mother
Rudi Jeschke
Marco's father
Erika Wolfram
Laura's mother
Hans Wolfram
Laura's father
Ute Skrzypczak
Rebecca's mother
Rudi Skrzypczak
Rebecca's father
Certificate
15
Distributor
City Screen Ltd
11,026 feet
122 minutes 31 seconds
Dolby
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Subtitles
Last Updated: 20 Dec 2011