An earlier film from the director of Run, Lola, Run, Tom Tykwer -- and it's easy enough to understand why we didn't get to see it before Lola ran (and ran). The introduction of the central characters (their names typed out letter by letter on the screen), interspersed with a hyperkinetic camera skimming over mountainous snowscapes, all to a techno-pop beat on the soundtrack, might raise the hopes of the jiggling-knee crowd who so enjoyed Lola. And the central situation -- a circle of people linked together by a two-vehicle accident -- seems similarly to be shaped by the heavy hand of fate. But the fill-in, while we await the farcical misunderstandings of the climax, is not terribly interesting, much less terribly kinetic. It is much more terribly pensive, and shallowly, superficially, posturingly pensive at best. A particular strain on belief, on patience, on plain and simple eyesight, is the business of one car-crash victim picking out, through his windshield from twenty paces away, the squiggly little scar on the back of the hairy head of the other driver, then obsessing over the shape of this scar (much like Richard Dreyfuss over the shape of Devils Tower in Close Encounters, even to the point of sculpting it in mashed potatoes), but entirely forgetting where it was that he saw the shape or why it is important to him. The strain is hardly justified when, after he finally remembers where he saw it, the victim uses an altogether different and simpler method of identifying the other driver. Or rather, misidentifying him, and then failing to use the scar to confirm the identification. Ulrich Matthes, Marie-Lou Sellem, Floriane Daniel, Heino Ferch. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.