For the record I saw it at the BFI Southbank, because if you're going to see a
film you might as well see the hell out of it. As per the instructions above I
went directly to the screen. I did not go to the Box Office counter. No sir.
It was a digital projection of a 2017 restoration. I can confirm that it
looked better than the screenshots in this article, which were taken from an
old DVD. Wings of Desire is a fantastic advertisement for
black and white film, and also colour film, but mostly black and white film.
I'm not sure why the BFI showed it. They're in the middle of a Powell +
Pressburger season, and I couldn't see any posters for Wings of Desire.
Perhaps the film reminded them of A Matter of Life and Death and
they thought "why not" and "yes" and "why not".
I can confirm that the cinema was packed. For a short period in the 1980s Wim
Wenders knew how to get bums on seats. After the one-two punch of
Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire his filmography
became incredibly erratic, but for a while he was up there with Jim Jarmusch
and Krzysztof Kieślowski etc. He was hip. He had Bono's phone number!
Probably.
Wings of Desire can be boiled down to two images. Solveig
Dommartin with tattered angel wings swinging on a trapeze, and Bruno Ganz,
also with angel wings, gazing down at Berlin. One can fly; one longs to fly.
Those two images have consistently drawn people to Wings of Desire. Who
is that woman, and who is that man? Do they meet? What kind of world do they
inhabit? That's why people go to see Wings of Desire.
A car, one of many
Some people have a movie face
Wings of Desire is a good film, verging on great, but it's
frustrating. It reminds me a lot of
Chungking Express. It's hard to dislike either film and no-one ever made friends by shitting
on them, but they have problems.
They were both shot on location in charismatic cities that still exist but
aren't quite the same. They are both excellent advertisements for good
old-fashioned 35mm motion picture film. They are a mixture of mood piece and
romance, and ultimately they feel unsatisfying because the moody elements
work well, but the filmmakers weren't interested in the ordinary stuff.
Chungking Express would have been far more effective if the crime
drama had been fleshed out and the romance had been plausible, and the same
problem affects Desire, minus crime plus plus romance.
The first two-thirds of Wings are slow, sad, mesmerising,
fascinating. The film stars Bruno Ganz as an angel who gazes down at Berlin
from the sky above. He can hear people's innermost thoughts but he can't
interfere with worldly matters. Along with his angel friends he documents
life on earth in a little notebook, making nowhere plans for nobody, and by
gosh he is bored. He wishes he could taste coffee or plant a tree or
something. He's good at being an angel. Kids love him. His wardrobe and
ponytail were on point circa 1987. But he's bored. He's so bored!
Ganz and his fellow angels stride along with an air of imperious detachment,
as if they were David Bowie living in Berlin in the late 1970s. They're
distant, non-judgemental, not entirely cold, but their life doesn't seem
much fun. One scene ends with the angels gathered in Berlin's central
library after closing time, left with no-one to observe, nowhere to go,
nothing to do, the last people at the party. It's not an enviable life,
being an angel.
The colour sequences represent our view of the world; the angels see in
crisp clear monochrome
Wings of Desire is simultaneously timeless and a little bit
old-fashioned. Not just because it was shot in the 1980s and has a lot of
old Porsches in the background, but also the general style.
I also have the impression that Wenders was culturally a few years out of
date. By the time Wings of Desire came out Berlin was bopping to the
hip new sounds of acid house and techno, but the film culminates with a
performance by Nick Cave, playing a song from 1984, and in general the
musings about the destruction of Berlin and its division by conflict feel
like something from an earlier era of filmmaking. I thought the Germans had
got over that by the 1980s.
The style of the film, with its lengthy internal monologues, slow camera
moves, showy composition, its themes of love and peace and war, belong to an
earlier age of high art film-making, a modernist age, rather than the
postmodern 1980s. Almost at times a pre-modern age. Very occasionally my
mind wandered to Alexander Korda's Things to Come and
Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, perhaps because of the
occasionally stagey sets, perhaps because of the sincerity. I'm not sure
why.
I mention the art film element because Wings could so easily have
been camp. There's a certain kind of stereotypical old-fashioned European
art film that hasn't aged very well. I'm thinking specifically of
Alphaville but there are many others. Wings has all the
ingredients, albeit that there isn't a hint a class struggle or Marxism or
Maoism or indeed politics at all, which is one of the reasons why it feels
timeless. The dialogue is heavy with internal monologues that consist of
lists and abstract questions answered with more questions. The soundtrack is
mournful cello music. It's a film in which people make a film. One of the
characters is a writer who believes that visionaries - such as film-makers,
for example - can heal the world. It ends with a dedication to other
filmmakers.
But it's much better than that. As a mood piece it's fantastic.
Wings is affecting without being sentimental, but at the same time it
has an emotional core. Curt Bois gives a good performance as an elderly
writer who has a crisis of faith while trying to find Potsdamer Platz. On
the surface his storyline should be pretentious, but his performance won me
over. I felt sorry for that old man and wanted to tell him that things
didn't turn out so bad, at least for a while. What's so funny about peace,
love, and understanding?
We also hear from an unnamed taxi driver who muses that we are all citadels,
each with a different password, and that if a politician could guess our
trigger phrase he, she, they would own us. "No-one is currently in a position to do this", he thinks, but what about mass-media and AI? Politicians are always
trying to guess our passwords. To get inside our defences, to say the magic
words. What if they learn to guess our passwords faster than we can change
them. What then.
Mid-way through the film we are introduced to Peter Falk, playing Peter
Falk, der Filmstar, who is shooting some kind of Second World War
drama in Berlin. I have the impression that most of his sequences were
improvised, including a scene where he tries on different hats.
Wings has a coldness to it, but the film warms up when Falk appears.
Was there ever an episode of Columbo set in Berlin? That would have
been fascinating. NB after writing this post I stumbled on
this fascinating issue of POV, a Danish film journal, and apparently yes, Falk's role was largely
improvised. Because he was good at it and Wenders wasn't a dummy.
Most plot summaries of Wings talk about the love story, but in
reality it has three parallel storylines - the elderly writer, the love
story, and Peter Falk, who is one of the few people who appears to be aware
of the angels. He can't see them - he isn't an angel himself - but he can
sense their presence, which becomes apparent in a striking scene where he
suddenly and unexpectedly addresses Ganz' character, who by rights should be
invisible. After an hour of Ganz hovering un-noticed it comes as a jolt.
Falk's storyline ends with a bittersweet sequence in which he urges Ganz'
character to explore the world, before ducking back into the darkness of a
film set. "You need to figure that out for yourself - that's the fun of it." It should be sad, because we never see Falk again, but there's a sense
that it's going to be alright. If the film had ended at that point I
wouldn't have minded.
Solveig Dommartin's movie face
I felt sad when Falk left the film. I was reminded that he's gone forever.
Wings has a melancholic undercurrent, because all of the main cast
are gone. Curt Bois died in 1991. Falk in 2011. Solveig Dommartin at a
strikingly young age in 2007. Bruno Ganz passed away in 2019, six years
after Otto Sander, who played his angel companion Cassiel.
As mentioned in the text, none of the main cast are with us any
more
Alas the film falls apart when it comes to the romance aspect, which
dominates the last act. The romance feels forced, as if Wenders felt that
Ganz' character needed greater motivation to give up his angelic life than
just ennui, so he settled on a love story, but didn't have his heart in it.
One problem is that the plot thread begins with Ganz spying on Dommartin's
character as she changes out of her circus gear, which is shot as if it was
a horror film. A more fundamental problem is that the two characters appear
to have nothing in common, and Dommartin seems far happier with her circus
colleagues than Ganz.
The two actors are individually great, but they have no romantic chemistry,
and the film doesn't take time to give them any reason to be together,
beyond "it was fated".
I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia
at the same venue
just before COVID, and the chemistry between Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif
was immense. I wanted them to kiss. In contrast the love story in
Desire left me cold. It ends with a lengthy monologue from Dommartin
that goes nowhere and doesn't say a great deal.
"But it's not a romance film, it's a high art meditation on the human
condition", which is true, but why couldn't the romance have been engaging
too? Under the Skin worked as both a creepy horror film and a...
whatever it was, ditto Mulholland Drive. The
recently-canonised Jeanne Dielman wasn't just an excellent guide
to preparing veal cutlets, it was a solid art film as well. In contrast
Wings' total lack of interest in unsubtle gushy emotions rather than
subtle moods lets it down.
But enough of the bad stuff. Out with the bad air, in with the good.
Wings is fundamentally episodic, so although the love story doesn't
work, it's forgivable. If anything the film is actually the tale of an elderly
author who has a crisis of faith, with a love story in the background as a
kind of added bonus, and I wonder if Wenders added the romance as a way of
getting more funding. It's also a film in which Peter Falk gives us life tips,
and that's good as well because Peter Falk was the bomb.
It's also a chance to explore a Berlin that no longer exists, which is
bittersweet, because it's easy to forget that the hip edgy Berlin of yore was
split in half by a death zone. But to have been there! At a safe distance, and
only visiting.
So I experienced three emotions, which are priceless, and with that I will
leave
Wings of Desire alone. It's big enough to look after itself.
EDIT: For the record I visited Berlin
back in 2016. Whenever I read through my old blog posts I think to myself "was that man
high on crack" and that post is no exception. But some of the pictures were
nice. This is what Berlin looked like in 2016 through the eye of an Olympus
Stylus, with a mixture of different types of film that I bought in Berlin,
because Berlin has some hip camera shops, or did in 2016.
Tempelhof, which was still a functioning airport in 1987.
At the time I was trying to check out locations that David Bowie might have
visited when he lived in Berlin; a location tour of
Wings of Desire would be awkward today because so much of the city
has changed, but
other people
have had a go.
