Wings of Desire

Rating:
Summary: When the child was a child . . .
Review: Wings of Desire should be seen by anyone who questions life--its purpose, its pleasures and hopes, its suffering, its loneliness and despair. German filmmaker Wim Wenders has masterfully infused Peter Handke's poem "Song of Childhood" and the symbols and themes of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke into a film that demands repeated viewings because of its ability to transcend the circular and maddening corporate demands of what life should be and how we as its unwavering constituents should think and respond.

"When the child was a child, it had no opinions about anything..." What we see in Wings is how disfiguring to life's simple enjoyment is the journey from childhood to adulthood. As the angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) traverse Berlin offering that intangible "push" that we all at some time need to get beyond negative thought ("I'll drag myself out again, and why not?"), the viewer gets a cross-section of adult "stories," the inner, unspoken, rambling, disjointed novels we all continuously create. What we realize from this cross-section of humanity is that behind a neutral countenance is most often an inner void of pleasure. And isn't that really how it is? How many times have you smiled, when inside there was nothing there to match?

But there are moments that Damiel and Cassiel observe that are remarkable: "A woman on the street folded her umbrella while it rained." It's the simple things that are available to us, that can bring us pleasure, that we all too often overlook. It's that deviation, that small 'road less traveled,' that has the potential to make a positive difference. It's that child we once were that we should pay more attention to. "We can only be as savage as we are absolutely serious." In other words, lighten up, be childlike, and enjoy.

The film's focus eventually moves to the beautiful Solveig Dommartin as the troubled trapeze artist, Marion. Damiel falls in love with her--her beauty, her spirit, her thoughts. She questions her place in life, who she is, why she is, and what she will do once the circus folds: "How should I live? Maybe that's not the question. How should I think?" There is a scene after her circus companions have departed, and she is all alone, that is truly inspiring for anyone who has been "left behind" and disillusioned with life. The spin she puts on her situation, the unconventional thought she dare considers, is a wonderful consideration for us all.

Watch this on a rainy Sunday and then go for a walk. Leave the umbrella behind.


Rating:
Summary: Best German film of the 80s
Review: Nothing else like this. Certainly not the insipid American remake, City of Angels, whose director, believe it or not, is included in those interviewed as part of the extras here (and it's pretty amazing to see that he speaks very intelligently--so how did his remake turn out so dumb?)

OK, enough of that. Wings of Desire is brilliant, inspiring, serious, contemplative, lyrical, and flat out astonishing. Though hardly scripted at all--made up largely of interior monologues supplied in great part by famed German novelist Peter Handke (The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick)--it has a beauty that derives from its willingness to move inside, to take the quiet moments many of us have and expose them, bring them out to reveal desperation, hope, confusion, despair, frustration, regret, loss, understanding.

If you were an angel whose mission was to watch over humans and you began to feel, after hundreds of years, that you needed more than the ethereal "contact" you have on a daily basis, would you forsake your eternal status to live life in the flesh for a limited span of years? That's the premise here and while this description of it could sound cliched, the director, Wim Wenders, makes this anything but. Seamlessly fusing the love of his favorite city, Berlin, with a love story that brings to the fore the humanity we all must feel and express to be, in essence, counted as human, he's crafted a masterpiece of cinema that at once tells us something substantial about why we live.

In the hands of many other directors, this could have been a pompous piece of work, full of overblown sentiment. But Wenders' intelligence is astonishing. His subtlety--even in how he's shot the film--is what captures us. Cinematography was done by the great Henri Alekan, 80 years old at the time of the shoot, the same cinematographer who shot the Cocteau film Beauty and the Beast in 1947, and as Wenders explains in the great featurette included here, Angels Among Us, Alekan made use of a decades-old technique that lends the film an oneiric quality which one wonders would have been possible without. The technique? Using Alekan's grandmother's silk stocking over the camera lens during the shoot. Fragile and delicate itself, the stocking filter provides a visual feel that connects to our sense of how fragile we are as human beings. A marvelous device.

What we can experience in absorbing this film is the sense that we have a unique status as humans here and how it may be possible to take advantage of that. One of the characters played by another octagenarian, Curt Bois, muses to himself about how fleeting peace is, spending his time either at the huge Berlin library poring over globes and books about the cultures of the world, or walking through what was then a barren Berlin (1987), remembering what used to be.

This is a film that does more than resonate. It permeates, it transforms. During the featurette, Wenders talks about how he received hundreds of letters telling him how this one film changed the lives of the letter writers dramatically. Completely understandable.

A film to own, to watch and re-watch. A film to cherish. A film to share.

Rating:
Summary: DVD Extras Worth a Look
Review: Several of the other reviews do an accurate job of describing the film, although be forewarned that some of the suspense (to the degree there is much) will be ruined by reading them. A few additional points I believe are worth adding. First, the Rilke poem at the beginning is striking and wonderful and the opening montage does a wonderful job of conveying the message of the common bonds of humanity in all of us. That message is emphasized by the clever mechanism of allowing children to see angels, when adults can't. Second, the DVD extras are really pretty good and do add to the quality of the product. This is a cult film and those who love the film will love the extras. Nice long interviews including with Peter Falk, both of the main angels, who it turns out are good friends who have worked together for years, and most of all an interview with Wim Wenders who describes the process of putting the movie together. The process borders on anarchy and it's amazing to hear how this process came together. It's also clear how much Berlin means to Wenders and that while the movie on one level is about universal themes such as the humanity in all of us and how truly wonderful it is to be alive, that at another level it is a poem in praise of Berlin. Definitely worth a look.

Rating:
Summary: Intriguing fantasy
Review: In director Wim Wenders' universe, we are all observed by silent, eternal angels who are invisible to all but children. They wander through the world like ghosts, privy to our thoughts but unable to participate in the world. The first two thirds or so of this film shows us what this existence is like. There is virtually no plot; rather, we are treated to evocative visuals while the thoughts of various Berliners unfold on the soundtrack--sometimes they are intriguing non sequiturs and sometimes fascinating philosophical questions. This is the strongest part of the film. When the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) assumes mortality out of love for a beautiful trapeze artist, the ensuing romance seems rather abrupt and unconvincing. To be continued...