C+

Apparently hoping to capitalize on the U.S. success of “Run
Lola Run” last year, an organization called Winstar Cinema has
now released director Tom Tykwer’s earlier (1997) feature.
But it’s unlikely that viewers captured by the verve and
energy of “Lola” will be much taken by this equally flashy,
but far more lugubrious effort.

Actually, “Winter Sleepers”–the title is drawn from the fact
that the story occurs in the snowy cold of a remote German
mountain town, where the main characters regularly congregate
at a bar called Sleepers–exhibits the same sort of technical
expertise that marked “Lola,” with masterful tracking shots
and explosions of photographic dexterity. And, like the later
film, it’s fundamentally concerned with the role of chance in
the outcome of human affairs. But the mood of manic intensity
which prevailed in “Lola” is here replaced with one of mournful,
dirgelike angst. The result is rather like “Lola” played at
half- or third-speed.

The plot begins with an accident in which a truck-and-trailer
combo driven by a troubled farmer named Theo (Josef Bierbichler)
is forced off the road by a car, and in the process Theo’s
young daughter is seriously injured. The car belongs to
handsome, hot-tempered ski instructor Marco (Heino Ferch), but
it’s actually being driven by Rene (Ulrich Matthes), an
oddball film projectionist who’s stolen it for a joyride while
Marco is in the sack with his local girlfriend Rebecca (Floriane
Daniel), a translator who shares a house with Laura (Marie-Lou
Sellem), a nurse and amateur actress. Laura not only becomes
one of the professionals watching over Theo’s injured daughter,
whose condition gradually deteriorates, but becomes romantically
involved with Rene, who had stumbled away from the accident and,
as we are later informed, suffers from short-term memory loss
as the result of an earlier incident. The resulting foursome
leads to some consternation over who is coupling with whom;
and meanwhile Theo searches obsessively for the driver who, in
his view, is responsible for his daughter’s injury, eventually
tracking down the owner of the vehicle–Marco. Thus closes
Tykwer’s Circle of Fatalistic Woe.

There are elements in “Winter Sleepers” that are quite striking
and memorable. The director and cinematographer Frank Greibe
capture some images of snow-covered peaks and valleys that
are truly remarkable, and the music score, composed by Tykwer,
Johnny Klimek and Reinhold Heil (with an occasional infusion
from the work of Avro Part), is almost Sibelian in the way it
tonally matches the bleak, wintry physical landscape.

But the characters are so frigid and emotionally detached that
it’s difficult to sympathize with them, or to care how the
convolutions of the story will work themselves out. Marco and
Rebecca in particular seem so aimless and unfeeling that their
fate has little resonance; and of course Rene’s memory malady
is a crushingly obvious metaphor for the lack of grounding in
the lives of the four leads and the generation they represent.

So visually “Winter Sleepers” is often mesmerizing, but its
lack of compelling content renders it a long, sometimes
entracing journey to a destination that doesn’t hold much
interest.

Like a well-dressed corpse lying stiffly in a casket (an
image that in fact occurs early in the film), Martha Fiennes’
filmization of Pushkin’s classic Russian poem is nicely
appointed but bloodless. To be sure, the tale of detached,
unemotional Russian aristocrat Evgeny Onegin (Ralph Fiennes,
the helmer’s brother) who initially rejects the romantic
advances of the beautiful country girl Tatyana (Liv Tyler),
only to fall hopelessly in love with her after their union
has become impossible, has been sumptuously mounted on locations
in Russia as well as on sets in the United Kingdom; and
cinematographer Remi Adefarasin has captured some strikingly
beautiful images–the sequences detailing Onegin’s fateful
duel with his immature neighbor Lensky (Toby Stephens), the
chance encounter of Onegin and Tatyana at a St. Petersburg
ball, and Onegin’s stalking of his beloved at a skating pond
in the Russian winter are all lovingly composed and artfully
accomplished.

For all its physical attractiveness, however, the tale never
touches the heart. Part of the fault is surely the director’s:
Fiennes made her name in commercials and music videos, but
here she abandons the sense of economy and concision she
practiced in those media in favor of stately, languorous
pacing which ultimately renders the material static and
uninvolving. As you watch you can almost feel her trying
desperately for the sort of dreamy, elegiac yet precise effect
that was so memorable in “The Age of Innocence,” but Fiennes
doesn’t yet have the degree of control which would allow her
to invest scenes with the inner intensity that the more
experienced Scorsese managed so effortlessly.

Her brother, meanwhile, puts his usual restrained style to
good use in fulfilling his sister’s aims: his Onegin is as
elegantly unhappy as one can imagine, dealing disdainfully
with every acquaintance and obligation and suffering quietly
from the ennui which fills his soul. It’s a minimalist
performance in which the actor’s clothes seem almost more
expressive than he is, but with a simple arch of an eyebrow
or curl of the lip Fiennes manages sporadically to suggest the
passions raging behind Evgeny’s steely surface.

Liv Tyler is less successful as Tatyana. She certainly looks
ravishing, both in her less refined opening scenes and in her
princess garb toward the close, but her voice doesn’t match
her coiffure, and ultimately her porcelain perfection seems
all too statuesque. Toby Stephens has verve as the doomed,
foolish Lensky, and Lena Headey has a few moments as his
fiance Olga, but Martin Donovan is reduced to stilted posing
as Prince Nikitin, Onegin’s cousin and rival.

That “Onegin” is truly a family affair is emphasized by the
fact that the score is by Magnus Fiennes, yet a third sibling;
his music is nice in a pleasantly Slavic idiom, but it’s only
when, as Onegin makes his last visit to Tatyana near the
picture’s close, the ravishing quintet from Beethoven’s
“Fidelio” swells up on the soundtrack (in the incomparable
performance conducted by Otto Klemperer) that the viewer
truly encounters the sort of ethereal beauty that the director
aims to realize visually on screen, but only fleetingly
achieves. In the final analysis her version of the story
isn’t much more impressive than the professional, but
pedestrian, adaptations of classics regularly shown on PBS or
A&E. Maybe it’s no accident that Pushkin’s largely inward
“verse novel” has never been filmed before in the sound era
(if you except a 1959 screen version of Tchaikovsky’s opera
of the same name). Perhaps its inner fire simply can’t be
captured cinematically. Or perhaps it will merely take
someone more adept than the Fiennes family to do so.