Criterion Collection: Wings of Desire [Blu-ray] [1987] [US Import]

I love this film and I love it because of so many things. I saw it for the first time when I was a teenager in mid 90s and I was so impressed... I was roaming the streets of Almaty (my home town in Kazakhstan) with my best friend and I asked her: "Do you think angels are walking together with us and collecting the spiritual signs of our existence?' Of course, it was a joke, by what a romantic joke... A longing for something magical that can happen to a mortal...

When you first watch the film, you wonder why Wim Wenders has picked two aging men in long black coats to be angels. That's not how you imagined an angel, after all. However, the further you watch the film, the more you realise that their angelic nature is in the way they look at everything, in their increadible eyes.

When I think about this film I think about all the good that can happen to an ordinary human being. This film highlights the best in all of us and makes us immortal for a short while... And I believe this feeling is worth it.

Natalia

A morning after the night before film that leaves such a deep impression that you wake with your head teeming with images and moments from it. I notice there are one or two reviewers who just "don't get it". I think the deal here is that if you don't have a feel for poetry, that is modern poetry , Baudelaire and after, then this will leave you lost and twitching. This fim is like one of Rilke's Duino Elegies bought to life for the screen. The premise, if you haven't already picked up on it, is that Angels are moving among men and women in Cold War, East Berlin. Invisible except to the occasional child, infinitely benign, but detached observers, they search endlessly for the most exquisite tokens of human expression, frailty and dignity, amid the myriad humdrum acts that constitute their otherwise monotonous lives. The more seeminly fragile and insignificant then the more treasured they are. From time to time the Angels get together to compare notes on the little acts and incidents that have left the deepest impressession on them. The Angels hear the thoughts of all those they move among, and for an extended part of the film's opening, we move with them through streets, tower block apartments and on public transport, randomly sampling the fragmentary thoughts of those they pass, from their most pressingly humdrum anxieties, through to the profoundest of reveries. The resulting stream of consciousness inevitably takes on the character of poetry of the most universal kind. Very gradually a plot emerges which eventually includes twists and revelations, gently comic and breathtakingly profound, that leave one with a stupified grin and a warm trickle inside, just knowing such innocence and purity of vision are still to be found in this life.

I was lucky enough to catch this on TV, but it's one of those films that I just have to turn my friends on to, at least those I know will understand. And I'm very much looking forward to the accompanying commentary from Wenders and Peter Falk, who does such a wonderful job of playing himself, who is playing himself as usual. The feature that floats like a recurring melody over the accompaniment of the whole film is the magnetic gaze of Bruno Ganz set in his beatific face. My wife was quite shocked when I pointed out that this was the same actor who had played Adolf Hitler with such uncanny similitude in Downfall [2004]. I understand Gollywood did their own bastardisation of this masterpiece, and I must admit that the thought of what Nicholas Cage must have done with this sublime role sends a shudder down my spine. Solveig Dommartin as the existentially self-realised trapeze artist is also riveting.

My question now is do I risk a go at the sequel, Far Away, So Close [1994], and spoiling it, knowing how fickle and inconsistent Wenders' genius can be?. The guy has created symphonic masterpieces like Paris, Texas [1984] and the nowhere to be found Iron Earth, Copper Sky. But then he's produced some quite odd turkeys as well. Sometimes he's managed to do both in the same movie, as with Until The End Of The World [1992], which was so magnificent right up to its strange and silly ending. Anyway, for now I have another chance to immerse myself in the warm poetic bath that is this to look forward to, and the pleasure of sharing it with friends whom I know will `get it'.

This is probably Wenders' masterpiece, though it followed the equally wondeful Paris, Texas. Wings of Desire was another collaboration with Austrian writer Peter Handke (The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty). Following the key works of the New German Cinema (Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities), Wenders went to work in America at Coppola's Zoetrope studios- making the problematic Hammett and the reaction The State of Things. Here he returned to Berlin, still divided by the wall which would fall two years later.

The film sits somewhere between It's a Wonderful Life, Rilke's Duino Elegies, The Cure's Just Like Heaven and The Seventh Seal: a metaphysical romance. The lead character is literally Berlin (the German title is 'The Sky Over Berlin); Wenders uses Damiel and Cassiel as two omniscient angels tracking life in 1980's Berlin: observing like a camera. Here we see them listening to people's thoughts in an unforgettable fashion (and this was an influence on REM's video for Everybody Hurts). Damiel sees Marion, a circus acrobat with a penchant for Nick Cave and decides to make the trip from eternity to her (Wenders reversal of Nick Cave's song From Her to Eternity- played here along with The Carny). Along the way he meets Peter Falk as "Peter Falk"- who just happens to be an ex-angel and the film moves back to pre-history and the spectre of the War and Nazism (Falk is making a WWII movie, with those conotations for West Germany- tying it in with such German films as The Marriage of Maria Braun and Mephisto which explore Germany's dark past).

This is pure poetry, as great as the best of Jean Cocteau in terms of transcendental imagery- every scene has resonance: a truly perfect film now restored on DVD. These are the people who see you when you cry (but who can never impinge on this world); the angels are non-intervensionist. Much better than the sappy Hollywood remake City of Angels- though it is worth seeing the post-wall/reunification sequel Faraway, So Close! where Cassiel follows Damiel into the mortal realm.

Hopefully Wenders will follow this with DVD issues of his best 1990's films, The Lisbon Story and Until the End of the World. This is one of the finest films of the 1980's , or any decade from the first century of cinema...