Wintersleepers (1997)

the audience applauded

Good concept, poorly executed.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Definitely not the worst film from the 90s, but it just seems that the one and primary goal of Tykwer was to fill his effort with as much artsiness and stylish camera-work as possible. Making a cohesive and believable plot was supposedly the last of his intentions. The characters in WS are too dumb and under-developed, delivering some brain-dead lines rarely heard in the dumbest horror flicks (as the one about "maybe it's better to live only 3 years", which was said by a character sitting near the 10-years old girl who had just died). Or another artsy moment of bewitching emptiness, when the blonde stopped on her way to the granny's funeral and started to urinate on the roadside with some grief on her face. Also, all these multiple coincidences in the end didn't make any good to the film.Anyway, the setting is quite beautiful and it lends some charm to this lame story. Hence 2,5/5. At least.

I had seen "Lola Rennt" before and I remember that I liked a lot (I even bought it on DVD). So when I got the chance to see another movie from Tom Tykwer I didn't think twice and watched it. Although it is very hard to compare both movies, I must say that I liked this movie even a bit more.In this movie we meet five people who, at first sight, don't seem to have much in common, but faith and love brings them all together. You'll see Rebecca. She's a translator who lives with her boyfriend, a ski instructor and a real womanizer, in a villa owned by her friend Laura, a nurse. Marco's car is stolen by Rene, a local cinema projectionist, who suffers from amnesia. He still knows everything that happened in the past but can't remember recent facts. While he's driving Marco's car, he causes an awful accident with a local farmer called Theo. Theo's daughter ends up in a coma and is rushed to the hospital where Laura works, where she dies later on. In the mean time Laura has fallen in love with Rene, who doesn't know what has happened. And Theo, who can't accept his daughter's death, tries everything to find the man who caused the accident and killed his daughter, so he can punish him...What makes this movie so good is the combination of some very fine acting, a great choice of music, very beautiful images and a touching story. If you like movies like "21 Grams" than you definitely have to see this one as well. This is the kind of movie that will never be a great success in the multiplexes, but that will be loved by all who like to see a movie with some depth. You know what I mean, it doesn't have to be art-cinema, but not the 36th sequel of a movie based on a comic book either.This is honest and sincere cinema from a country that isn't exactly very well known for it. Although I know several German movies that are more than just worth a watch ("Der Untergang" and "Lola Rennt" are two others), German movies aren't as well known or famous as the ones from Spain and Sweden and to a lesser extent France. Nevertheless Tom Tykwer proves with this one what a good director he is and that's why I can recommend it to everybody who likes to see some good, European cinema. I give it an 8.5/10.

This movie pictures the life of five characters connect by a car accident in a snowing road, provoked by the projectionist Rene (Ulrich Matthes) and the broken farmer Theo (Josef Bierbichler). Rene is a kind of melancholic intellectual, who has amnesia problem and takes picture of the most important events of his life to recall them. One night he drinks too much and steals the car of the ski trainer Marco (Heino Ferch) just for fun. Due to a lack of attention of Theo on the road, there is a dreadful accident, when his young daughter is seriously hurt in the head. She is sent to a hospital without the necessary resources for such a case, but she is unable to be transferred to another suitable place due to the bad weather and her conditions. The nurse in charge of the young girl is Laura (Marie-Lou Sellen), an anorexic woman full of problems and inferiority complex due to her body, who lives in a house inherited from her grandmother with her friend Rebecca (the delicious and sexy Floriane Daniel). Rebecca works in translation, usually wears red colored clothes and has a kind of engagement (indeed their relationship is limited to sex) with Marco. He is a typical unfaithful male man, sexually chasing the women trained by him and being an empty person. The story is a kind of metaphor with the cycle of life, through the lives of five persons with different attitudes and behavior, who are linked by an incident, having death and birth but with life going on. The direction and the performance of the cast are excellent and the photography is wonderful. My vote is eight.Title (Brazil): `Winter Sleepers – Inverno Quente' (`Winter Sleepers – Hot Winter')

By now, Tykwer may be tired of having everything he's done measured against his own gold standard, 1998's Run Lola Run. But in this case the comparison is natural, even inevitable, because Winter Sleepers shows Tykwer moving toward audacious, devil-may-care plot contrivances, of which Lola was the epitome--only, he doesn't move far enough in that direction to achieve the kind of success Lola enjoyed. The result is a storyline that is rather unbelievable, but not wildly enough so to make it a kind of cinematic Picasso...but more nearly like the work of a plodding third-rate painter of traditional landscapes who has yet to master perspective, say.But this particular analogy is unfair to WS, which does offer us some quite beautiful visuals; the favorable comparisons made by others to Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter are apropos. The soundtrack is hypnotic in places, and the movie engages the viewer, at least until the next unlikely plot twist.A falling-between-two-stools kind of effort. Still fairly enjoyable though.7/10