Der große Schlaf

On a scant island, three women live together in a house. A strange slumber has enfolded the place where everybody is devoted to one another in a tangled triangel of love full of agony and unfulfilled desires. A fisherman and his family are the sole further occupants on the island. They seem to be frozen in time, with a terrible, yet utterly ungraspable secret that lies just beneath the surface. Somehow these two poles are inevitably drawn to one another and the clash, when it comes in the end, causes first death and then: birth. The imagery in "The Big Sleep" is powerful and the story told in all its symbolistic abstraction and elliptical cipher has a primal truth. There is no logic of time and place and the viewer is left to his own devices at all times. It is almost as if the great drama can only be felt, yet not be understood.