12/05/2006

One year after its presentation in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Zorro (Filmwelt) is releasing Benjamin Heisenberg’s first feature, Sleeper, in Germany this Friday. The film deals with the complexity of human relations, envisaged like dysfunctional triangles, à la René Girard.

The film opens with the arrival of Johannes (Bastian Trost), a scientific researcher who is shown to his new lab by his colleague Farid (Mehdi Nebbou), an Algerian scientist on whom the secret services asked Johannes to report, as they suspect him to be a sleeper spy for a terrorist organisation. An ambiguous friendship starts between the two men and is complicated by their meeting Beate (Loretta Pflaum), with whom they form a strange ménage à trios, tainted with desire and jealousy, with the line between friendship and betrayal not so clear-cut.

In this film, relationships are never direct; they are always mediated by the presence of a third party (Beate, Mrs Wasser of the secret services, the head of the lab). It seems that in life, triangles can never be equilateral but rather isosceles. Like in the video games through which the two main protagonists confront each other, it is all about strategy and things are never even.

From the very beginning, the director shows that when two people meet, not only friendship but also antagonism ensues, which is probably why Farid is puzzled in this respect and owns quite a few books on how to make friends to try and sort this out. To emphasise the ambiguity, Heisenberg films his characters in an unobtrusive manner so we never know what they really think.

Sleeper is definitely an artistic project, an ‘open work’ where only questions are asked, and never answered. As the director himself says, it represents a new trend in German cinema which “in the 80s and early 90s, was trying to make very American, mainstream commercial films.” The film was co-produced by two production companies highly committed to promoting quality films in the German language: Juicy Film (Germany) and Coop 99 (Austria).

Other European films released this week include Stupid Boy [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Switzerland’s Lionel Baier (distributed by Salzgeber), UK production Silence Becomes You by Stephanie Sinclaire (Filmlichter) and two French co-productions, Asterix et les Vikings (Universum), a Danish co-production, and Silent Hill by Christophe Gans (Concorde), co-produced with Canada.

(Translated from French)