• Film Festival Gijon 1997: best direction and best production design
• FIPRESCI Prize (Int. Association of Film Critics)
• Thessaloniki International Film Festival 1997: audience prize
• Bavarian Film Award1997 for best new producers (VGF Prize)
• Federal German Film Award in Silver 1998, for best film
• Federal German Film Award 1998 for best cinematographer

“Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow…”
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) The Waste Land

 From Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey to Claude Sautet’s Les Choses de la Vie, the theme of fate and coincidence has coursed through Western film and literature.  In his second movie, Tom Tykwer adapts the novel by Anne-Françoise Pyszora with great subtlety and introspection, while never forsaking the suspense that lies at the core of the story.

The setting is almost more important than the characters.  Wintersleepers unfolds in the Berchtesgaden region of Bavaria, with its jagged peaks and immense skies dwarfing the skiers who confront its slopes.   Becky (Floriane Daniel) lives in a villa owned by her friend Laura, who’s a nurse and amateur stage actress. Marco, a ski instructor, is involved with Becky and wants to move in with her, while Laura encounters another local guy, René.  The interaction between these four characters forms the matrix of Wintersleepers, although the “outsider” who provokes the initial tragedy is a farmer (none other than Josef Bierbichler, who played the domineering father in Deadly Maria).

Destiny envelops these restless individuals, as stealthily and as implacably as the weather.  Ice and mist prove deadly elements throughout the film.  Marco, as the professional ski-instructor, should know best how to cope with the elements. The most egocentric of the companions, he’s a good-looking slob who lies around munching chocolates, watching trashy TV, and two-timing – even three-timing – his girlfriend.  Tykwer clearly identifies most with René, who by his own admission is “reserved, inhibited, frustrated, hesitant, closed-up, pulled together, egocentric – and not hungry!”  An army accident has left René with a deficient memory, and he needs to take snapshots of things and people to recall them later.  Laura, attracted to this soul-mate, has a tendency to faint at odd moments and is looking desperately for some fulfilment to banish her sense of inadequacy.  Becky seems more sensual and more at ease with herself, but even she frets over her relationship with Marco, and yearns for a life beyond mere sex, and the grind of freelance translation work.  When her grandmother dies, grief overwhelms her, as it does Theo, the sullen, obsessive farmer, as he realises that his daughter may die after the fatal road crash at the start of the movie. 

In his quest for structural clarity, Tykwer has been inspired by painters as various as Delacroix, Warhol, and Richter.  For example, Becky wears red clothes and drives a red car, even in mourning, and indeed each character favours a different colour.    And although there are passages of exhilarating action and suspense, one feels that Tykwer’s more at home with the intervals of contemplation – like the sepulchral, long-held shot of Theo watching over his daughter’s corpse in the hospital, or the similar image of Marco, seated amid the debris of an all-night party, coming to terms, one feels, with the emptiness of his life and lifestyle.

It’s exciting to see all kinds of new skills emerging in Tykwer’s second feature.  For example, his use of the 360º pan as Frank Griebe’s camera circles round René to show his disorientation after the car crash, and again around Laura and René as they begin to talk in intimate terms.  Or the curious, disembodied close-up of Laura’s hair being cropped, while off-screen we hear the voice of René asking her to dinner, symbolic of a new departure.  Even more trademark Tykwer is the finale, as Marco skis to his doom from a mountain ridge.  He utters no scream, and there is not the sickening thud of a body striking the earth.  Instead, Marco soars and soars through the void, flying into a charmed state of extinction, somehow cheating circumstance like the lovers in The Princess and the Warrior and Heaven.  His death is entirely arbitrary, and ironically  René, who on a whim originally stole Marco’s car, survives to share a final moment of intimacy with the baby Laura has borne him.  The spiral of emotions is at last fulfilled.

The soundtrack also assumes the capital role that it will in all Tykwer’s films.  The mesmeric score at the start of Wintersleepers increasingly reminds us of fate galloping relentlessly on, and Arvo Pärt’s music gives the exterior sequences an austere, foreboding mystique.  From the brief keening of wind as a door opens in the villa, to the pulsing of a respirator in the hospital room, the ambient sounds are used with consummate discretion.  It’s symptomatic of Tykwer’s delicate approach to his material, however abrasive it may occasionally appear. Each character responds to a susceptible inner nature, concealed by a skin-deep assurance just as Marco’s stolen car is for a time hidden beneath the snow.  From the outset of his career, Tykwer has shown a fondness for individuals who cling with difficulty to the wheel of life and in so doing commit what society describes as “criminal” acts – Maria killing her husband and father, René here accidentally causing the death of Theo’s daughter, Manni with his drugs in Run Lola Run, Bodo and the bank heist in The Princess and the Warrior, and of course Philippa the “terrorist” bomber in Heaven.