COLD COMFORT SKI RESORT

Winter Sleepers : psychological thriller. Starring Ulrich Matthes,  Marie-Lou Sellem, Floriane Daniel, Heino Ferch and Josepf Bierbichler. Cinematography by Frank Griebe. Written by Tom Tykwer and Anne-Francoise Pyszore. Directed by Tom Tykwer. In German with subtitles. Rated R. Now playing at Bay Area Theaters.

Winter Sleepers is a thriller that German director Tom Tykwer made right before last years fabulous, dynamic Run Lola Run.  In some ways it’s a complete opposite of Lola: slow and meditative where Lola rushed at and zipped by like a bullet train. This tale of spiritual emptiness and the pull of fate is just as thematically ambitious, but not quite as good.

Set at a Bavarian ski resort during the Holidays, Winter Sleepers tells the intertwining stories of five people: four damaged youngsters in search of love, meaning and themselves and their encounter with a poor high mountain farmer.

Marco (Heino Ferch) is a dissolute aimless skiing instructor who eases his ennui by watching TV and chasing every skirt in sight.  When the film opens his roving but lonely eye has fallen on Rebecca (Floriane Daniel), a confident appearing but insecure translator at the resort who rents a room at a chalet from Laura (Marie-Lou Sellem), a nurse at the local hospital, who appears to suffer from epilepsy.  One snowy morning he stops by the chalet in his snazzy new car for a quick roll in the hay, leaving the car door unlocked and the keys in the ignition.

Then along comes Rene, (Ulrich Matthes), the lonely projectionist in the village’s sole moviehouse, who, feeling carefree and impudent after a night of boozing snaps a furtive photo of Marco and Rebecca getting it on then, then steals Marco’s car for a joyride.

While zooming up the road, he nearly collides head on into a truck pulling a horse trailer driven by Theo (Josef Bierbichler), a struggling local farmer whose daughter has snuck into the horse trailer without his knowledge. Theo drives the truck and trailer off the road and is knocked unconscious while his daughter is critically injured.

After plunging Marco’s car into a massive snow bank, where it remains buried and forgotten for the rest of the movie, Rene walks away uninjured . . . and due to brain damage he suffered while serving in the military, with no memory of what’s happened. In fact he has no short-term memory at all and relies on his photographs to keep his sense of reality intact. Rene is a man who needs to be a voyeur in order to make sense of anything.  Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), the two brief snapshots he has taken that fateful morning are not enough to trigger the memory of his role in the unfolding tragedy.

Meanwhile, Marco wonders where his car his, while Theo the farmer seeks vengeance against the man who killed his horse and injured his daughter. The film is a slow dance of alienation and retribution that takes place in a beautiful mountain winter setting. This setup promises much, but doesn’t deliver much impact in the end. The climax, while ending in a terrific stunt fall of a mountain, feels badly contrived.

Winter Sleepers is a gorgeous looking but long film that takes a long path to get where it’s going.  Heavy attention is paid to character, which is normally a good thing, but the film often feels soft and repetitious and likely could use some trimming.  Character details abound, some relevant (the growing romance between Rene and Laura; Marco’s hypocritical jealousy towards Rebecca; Laura’s moral awakening while attending Theo’s daughter at the hospital) some not (Rebecca masturbating after breaking up with Marco).

Nor do the plot threads tie together well.  Theo becomes obsessed with the blurry memory he has of Rene leaving the scene of the accident and thinks he saw Rene’s scar.   Rene does have a scar, but it’s buried under the hair on the back of his head.  How Theo is able to see it in his condition is never explained, but his obsession with it equals Richard Dreyfuss’ pursuit of the image of Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Once he discovers Marco’s car in the snow bank, the matter of the scar takes another clumsy twist as the film lumbers towards its gorgeously photographed and edited but awkward conclusion. Tykwer wishes to draw attention to the interconnectedness of everything with this contrivance, but a contrivance is all it is. It lacks that sense overwhelming inevitability that tragedy involves.

Still, despite the flaws in the script, Tom Tykwer is a true visual virtuoso and all of Winter Sleepers is a fluid pleasure to look at.  A good deal of the credit for its look surely belongs to Lola cinematographer Frank Griebe. His work invests the snowy mountain landscapes with an atmosphere of mystery and dread that wraps like a cold cloak around the souls of its lost and drifting characters and gives a profound sense of their own spiritual and moral entrapment.