Digital Overtone

From the pen and from behind the camera of the man who delivered the phenomenal Lola Rennt (Run Lola Run) we get Winterschläfer (Winter Sleepers). This film is strongly reminiscent of recent films such as Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch) in its complex but masterful organization and utter lack of a satisfying denouement: it is the story of three couples (though this film often treats them as six individuals) whose lives are altered and inextricably intertwined in the aftermath of an auto accident. Unlike in Amores perros, only two of the central figures were involved in the accident, and only one knows it actually happened. The alterations are therefore far less perceptible, if equally significant: A man with short-term memory loss steals a car and is through no fault of his own involved in an accident; a nurse begins a romantic relationship with that man (who has no recollection of the event) even as she treats the daughter of the other; the man who remembers begins his wrong-headed search for revenge on the owner of the car—a man who is romantically involved with the nurse’s roommate and knows the car thief indirectly through her—for his daughter’s condition, alienating himself from his wife and the people who care for him; his wife ends up participating in a seemingly inconsequential meeting with a women with whom the car owner is involved in an affair while her husband confronts the owner himself, in a crucial, understated, dramatically ironic scene, manipulating circumstance and fate to create a confluence of chance and misunderstanding that is nothing short of brilliant.

One would be hard-pressed to assign a concise plot to Winterschläfer. There is no protagonist, no antagonist, no heroism; there and no revelations. The movie itself is driven wholly by a cycle of circumstance and misunderstanding: by real, ordinary life. In this way it carries much subtler undertones of the major themes dealt with in Lola rennt. The characters are carefully maneuvered into situations that perpetuate this cycle, in which the small, off-the-cuff decisions they make (or fail to make) precipitate much grander (and unintended) events. Tykwer does not judge his characters in subjecting them to this cycle, nor does he make sweeping statements about the nature of modern relationships; on the contrary, the writer’s voice is entirely absent from the film. There is little attempt to clarify character motivations or relationships—viewers are left to infer (or, for the more lazy, be confused)—to the extent that the audience is intentionally misled into making incorrect assumptions (and sometimes shouting them at the tv) that are only clarified much later (perpetuating the cycle of misunderstanding even outside the film).

So why bother? This movie should be seen, if for no other reason than because it is Tykwer’s demonstration par excellence that he can tell a complex story with the best contemporary writers. But there are other reasons. Winterschläfer is more than just a technical exercise, though it is that in spades. Tykwer’s real brilliance lies in his ability to take as his subjects ordinary people going about their quotidian lives, unawares of any larger pattern, and elevate them not into heroes but into something better, something in which we can see a little of ourselves, a little of out own need, our own confusion and desperation, our own humanity.

Posted by Kyle / criticism and film