Winter Sleepers

A film set in a ski town in the German Alps. Rebecca and Laura share a house. One is a translator, the other a nurse at the hospital. Marco is a ski instructor. He is Rebecca's boyfriend; he stays at the house, leaves his car in the street, and forgets the key in it. René works as a cinema projectionist. After an accident he has short-term memory loss; to remember he photographs constantly and keeps notes. One night he takes the car. On the road he collides with a horse-drawn cart and drives away. A man is injured in the crash. Theo is a farmer; his daughter was in the cart and she goes into a coma. Theo looks for the car. All he saw was part of a number plate and a scar on the driver's face. From there the film brings four people closer together. Nobody knows anybody but their paths keep crossing. René does not remember. He does not know he caused the accident and carries the answer in his photographs. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but chance: the film describes how people affect each other without noticing, and does not turn it into an argument. The snow is constant. Throughout, the sky is closed, the roads are iced, and outside is dangerous. The form is dense. The camera moves, the transitions are hard, and some scenes are stretched in slow motion. This is Tom Tykwer's second feature; he gained international recognition with his next, and the formal experiments of that film are visible here from the start. The source is Anne-Françoise Pyszora's novel; the author worked on the screenplay too. Ulrich Matthes, Marie-Lou Sellem, Floriane Daniel and Heino Ferch are in the cast. Tom Tykwer directed and co-wrote. Who it is for: anyone who likes stories of intersecting lives and German cinema of the 1990s. Who it is not for: anyone looking for pace; the film runs close to two hours and the connections build slowly in the middle.