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

Bruno Ganz , Solveig Dommartin , Wim Wenders    Blu-ray
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
Price: Ł35.45
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Frequently Bought Together

Criterion Collection: Wings of Desire [Blu-ray] [1987] [US Import] + Paris, Texas [Blu-ray] [1984] + The Seventh Seal [Blu-ray] [1957]
Price For All Three: Ł58.72

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Product details

  • Actors: Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Curt Bois, Peter Falk
  • Directors: Wim Wenders
  • Writers: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke, Richard Reitinger
  • Producers: Anatole Dauman, Ingrid Windisch, Joachim von Mengershausen, Pascale Dauman
  • Format: AC-3, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
  • Language: German
  • Subtitles: English
  • Dubbed: English, French
  • Region: Region A/1 (Read more about DVD/Blu-ray formats.)
  • Aspect Ratio: 16:9 - 1.66:1
  • Number of discs: 1
  • Classification: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) (US MPAA rating. See details.)
  • Studio: Criterion
  • DVD Release Date: 3 Nov 2009
  • Run Time: 128 minutes
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
  • ASIN: B002IVDLGE
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 134,417 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)

Reviews

From Amazon.co.uk

"There are angels over the streets of Berlin," quotes the movie poster, but these are like no angels you've ever seen. Bundled in dark overcoats, they watch over the city with ears open to the heartbeat of the human soul, listening to the internal musings and yearnings of earthbound humans like existential detectives. In these delicate, astounding scenes we float through the thoughts of dozens of Berlin citizens, from the weary and worn to the hopeful and young, as the angels record the magic moments for some heavenly record. When Damiel (the empathic and sensitive Bruno Ganz) falls in love with an angel of another sort, the lonely trapeze artist Marion (willowy, sad-eyed Solveig Dommartin), he gives up the contemplation and observation of life to experience it himself.

Wim Wenders' most purely romantic film is like poetry on celluloid, a celebration of the transient and fragile moments of being human: the warmth of a cup of coffee on a cold day, the embrace of a friend, the touch of a lover, the rapture of love. Opening with an angel's-eye view of Berlin in silvery black and white (delicately captured by the great cinematographer Henri Alekan, who photographed Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast 40 years earlier), it transforms into a gauzy colour world when Damiel "crosses over" by sheer will. Peter Falk plays himself as a fallen angel with a special sensitivity for celestial visitors ("I can't see you, but I know you're there," he proclaims), and Otto Sander, whose smiling eyes brighten a face etched by eons of waiting and watching, is Damiel's partner. Wenders made a sequel in 1993, Faraway, So Close, and Hollywood remade the film as City of Angels with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan. --Sean Axmaker, Amazon.com


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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
78 of 83 people found the following review helpful
By Ntshk
Format:DVD
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

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
By John Ferngrove TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
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'.
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44 of 48 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the finest films of the 1980's. 3 Oct 2002
By Jason Parkes #1 HALL OF FAME
Format:DVD
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...

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Most Recent Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars angels
nice film but I can see why they remade it, you have to love black and white movies to enjoy this,
Published 1 day ago by Paul Heaton
5.0 out of 5 stars Gift
My friends enjoyed the movie. Tends to prove the CD was in good state.
For me it's a masterpiece !
Published 4 days ago by Nina
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding...
A classic film and an abosolute must for any cinema buff. It's hard to know where to start....great cast, beautiful photography and the most engaging story. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Robin D. Forrest
5.0 out of 5 stars Very rare
You have to know what to expect from this movie before you start watching it.
Still waiting for Far away, so close.
Published 1 month ago by b
5.0 out of 5 stars I don't get it ...
I've been through five pages of "reviews" now, and not a single one of them reviews the actual product, i.e. that particular DVD. Read more
Published 3 months ago by R. Stadler
5.0 out of 5 stars The only version worth watching
I had seen Wim Wender's Wings of Desire many years ago and the memory remained. Watching it again on DVD, I realized how many wonderful aspects I had forgotten. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Maria Hale
1.0 out of 5 stars Not True!
Mr Herzog would have us belive in ANGELS, and that, if they actualy wanted to "do it" in sleazy lounges in Berlin, or to consort within, they would. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Young
5.0 out of 5 stars angels over Berlin
As soon as you begin to watch this movie, you know you are in for something special. The idea in itself is something quite wonderful; - angels that are observers of everyday life,... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Mr. Robert Marsland
4.0 out of 5 stars The daring young girl on the flying trapeze
I was surprised to find it was well over twenty years since I`d last seen this film. On the other hand, it often has the look and feel of a 60s or 70s film, with slight echoes of... Read more
Published 14 months ago by GlynLuke
4.0 out of 5 stars It was fun!
I liked the perspective, the color, the storytelling and the ending. And Peter Falk and Wim Wenders too. They are marvelous...!
Published 15 months ago by ringokun
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