Survivor

...Rebecca, who translates Harlequin romances...

...It was his constant bossiness, rather than any skill deficiency, that sealed the fate of retired contractor B.B...

...Rather than character, it's dramatic irony that turns him on, our accidental collisions and hidden interactions in the larger scheme of things...

...Tykwer is a director who needs to keep things moving--literally...

...Not long ago, the movie Fight Club dramatized this ambivalence in a more expressionistic narrative...

...Actually, it's more like bonus month on Wall Street: whichever "Survivor" pawn is left after thirteen episodes will win a million dollars...

...At first glance, Tykwer's current film couldn't be more dissimilar...

...In fact, many of the show's episodes resemble anecdotes from the better-business-management tomes that recently have swarmed into bookstores like a plague of locusts (Management Lessons from Pulau Tiga, after all, doesn't sound much sillier than Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun or Power Plays: Shakespeare's Lessons on Management...

...We're tantalized by the sight of people eating live maggots, or a family boiling their laundry in Victorian-era washing soda, because those experiences seem, on one level, more authentic than our own luxurious, mediated existence...

...Andersen...

...It was like watching a kid at a computer...

...It's the same old game of fate after all...

...What happens to a European filmmaker who discovers his gift is not for romance or tragedy or existential angst or the human comedy or the sorrows of war, but rather for plot twists and the thrill of technical feats, for what the machines can do, the zoom and the wow...

...Commonweal | 9 August 11, 2000...

...His motion shots have a seductive urgency all their own, set to "Tubular Bells"-style music as the Steadicam swoops over glaciers and snowbound glades...

...Canada's History Channel will begin airing the program in October...

...Far from the hustle and grit of Berlin, Winter Sleepers follows a quartet of young Germans lazing their lives away in a picturesque ski town in the Alps...

...Put them together in a house and see what happens...

...The sport car flies over an embankment into a field of snow, the farmer swerves, and the trailer in which he's bringing an ill horse to the vet jackknifes--gravely injuring his young daughter, stowed away on a lark inside...

...If dialogue comes off as filler, that's because, according to Tykwer, it is: it's how we fill the time while fate decides its plan for us...

...The film replayed its heroine's day three times, with tiny variations creating a trio of outcomes-a hoary, forked-paths-of-fate idea which Tykwer, brazenly hitting the reset button, attacked with manic Gameboy verve...

...Laura, a nurse and (dismal) amateur actress...

...Remarking on the phenomenon, business journalists have zestfully flourished demographics and Nielsen ratings ("Survivor" seems to be pulling even with the ABC juggernaut "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"), while more philosophical critics have brooded on the sociological significance of the new reality shows, which seem to cater to an insatiably voyeuristic public...

...Lo/a solved this problem by tossing out content altogetheris character a drag...

...The Club Med exoticism of "Survivor," though, does seem a projection of our longing, on some level to escape the openness of the modern era...

...He has his eyes on another story, one that begins when Rene takes Marco's sport car for an impulsive joy ride...

...Rene, a homely, shy film projectionist...

...The corporate myth assumes that we can control our destiny and that the universe is ultimately comprehensible--an outlook that implicitly contradicts the orientalist strain of "Survivor," with its promise of mystery (what other reason for that background chanting in the credit sequence...

...The same way you thrive when you're a high-powered business executive, it turns out: you think about "team building" and "morale" and how to "communicate" better, just as the "Survivor" contestants have done since day one...

...At the second tribal council he had to snuff out his torch and make his desolate way to CBS's "Early Show," which interviews each survivor the morning after his or her exile...

...Like the other new reality shows, "Survivor" may promise scientific objectivitywe can watch animosities grow and power relationships shift among the islanders, as if we were peering at bacteria through a microscope but what the series delivers is classic myth: the idea that a seductive Otherness characterizes the East...

...To call Tykwer's style "kinetic" doesn't go far enough...

...The ten strangers who agreed to be immured in a house for CBS's "Big Brother" have to endure camera surveinance twenty-four hours a day---even in the bathroom...

...Survivor" has been a ratings sensation for CBS, which is planning two more editions of the series, set in different wild locales, for 2001...

...Then get rid of it!--and finding a metaphysical conceit to serve as perfect vehicle for pure moviemaking skill...

...only when in physical pain could he really feel...

...and thus the startling disjunction between his film's jazzed-up, chromatic style and its monotonous (and banal) content...

...You can feel Tykwer hanging on to the idea of a movie with the suffering and humanistic soul of a Bergman or Antonioni, even as his talents pull him in another direction altogether...

...Newly released here in the United States, Winter Sleepers in fact predates Run Lola Run, and it's interesting to watch Tykwer grope toward the dazzling, aerobic style of his later (and better) film...

...motion--the capricious moves of doom--is actually his subject...

...More ludicrous is the pseudoprimitivism bandied about by Probst, who wields a googly-eyed "immunity idol" (picture a totem pole a little larger than your cell phone) as he bosses the tribes about, and who drops grandiose lines like "On the island, fire represents life...

...Marco, the egotistical ski instructor and loutish womanizer...

...As for the anthropological experiment that was first out of the starting gate--CBS's "Survivor," which kicked off in May--its participants have had to eat barbecued rats and live maggots while stranded (with camera crews) on Pulau Tiga Island, near Borneo...

...PBS can pad "The 1900 House" all it likes with educational factoids about, say, Victorian wallpaper glue, but the salient revelation of this and similar programs is our willingness to accept the information age's sure erosion of privacy...

...r~ Rand Richards Cooper is the author of The Last to Go and Big as Life...

...ummertime, and the living is easy--unless, that is, you're one of the foolhardy folk who volunteered for TV's new "reality" shows, in which case life is grueling, disgusting, claustrophobic, and broadcast to millions of viewers...

...God, what they can do...

...Whenever Winter Sleepers turns to the foursome's self-involved, angst-ridden relationships, however, the film bogs down spectacularly...

...After all, in an increasingly cyber-oriented world, sometimes reality doesn't feel real at all...

...Look for Tykwer on this side of the Atlantic, soon...

...Money rules, even when the best entertainment around is lathering in a mud volcano...

...Winter Sleepers is an interesting failure, the flawed, even contradictory effort of a gifted young filmmaker discovering he doesn't really want to make the kind of film he grew up admiring...

...Grief and revenge lie ahead, along with further chance encounters and mistaken identities, as the characters are posted to their respective destinies...

...This ensemble ennui seems Bergmanlike, but Tykwer isn't actually much interested in inner lives...

...For the film's corporate-drone protagonist, the only way to escape the numbness of the modern professional's existence was to regress to primal violence...

...Today's crop of real-world hardship dramas appear to harp on a similar string...

...Lola felt like something new, its nonstop pyrotechnics informed less by movies than by MTV, video games, and interactive storytelling...

...On a mountain road, Rene suffers a near-collision with a vehicle driven by a farmer, Theo...

...As if the cuisine weren't bad enough, now and then the smug TV host (Jeff Probst) summons them to a torch-lit "tribal council . . . . Survivor" Commonweal | 8 August 11, 2000is decked with more phony exotica than The Mikad0--where they have to vote one of their number off the island...

...Veering uneasily between one myth and the other, "Survivor" expresses our uneasiness with the better-business mindset that seems to be infiltrating all aspects of society-from politics, governed by focus groups and spin doctors, to the nonprofit theater, whose leaders now brood about long-range strategic plans and institutional renewal...

...When the camera is not pinned on griping, gossiping contestants--who have been divided into two competing "tribes" for added suspense---it often bends toward atmospheric images that ooze a mysterious remoteness: sunset over a pristine beach, firelight dancing over naked flesh...

...It's kind of like Judgment Day on earth," the chemist Ramona Gray brightly remarked of this ordeal...

...Viewers willing to give CBS an hour a week can watch this rather hackneyed legend do battle with a second one, of greater currency in contemporary American culture: the myth of corporate success...

...A shimmering green bed sheet, a lacy red silk bra, the Mediterranean blue of the ski instructor's shirt: Tykwer and his cinematographer, Frank Griebe, strew glistening gems everywhere, setting these German yuppies against the white blankness of the Alps and the drab brown misery of the farmer's life...

...For example, on Pulau Tiga, as in many ofrices, personality affects group wellbeing as much as effort and talent do...

...Develop your listening skills, so your co-workers (co-islanders) feel you value their opinions...

...There's gorgeous color, too...

...Members of Britain's Bowler family, enacting a Victorian lifestyle for PBS's "The 1900 House," have to read by gaslight and boil their laundry...

...The moral...

...If there was something ponderously late-adolescent in Tykwer's awed speculations about destiny, the upside was an irrepressible energy and an easy, astounding technical virtuosity...

...Up in Canada, two married couples recently repaired to the prairie, pregnant sow in tow, to recreate the existence of 1870s pioneers for "Pioneer Quest: A Year in the Real West...

...How do you thrive on an island in the South Ct~na Sea...