Movie Review: Wings of Desire

MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING! This review and discussion contains numerous spoilers. If you don't want to have the movie ruined before you see it, or you just want to skip this post, click here to go to the next post.

Strictly speaking, this won't be a review, but more like an appreciation. I did a 4000 word review/analysis of Battle Royale Friday and still haven't recovered.

Wings of Desire is Wim Wenders' 1987 film about Berlin, angels, love, memory and friendship. It's a meditation, almost a reverie, and a hymn. Berlin itself is a character, her buildings, streets and landmarks taking a prominent, almost living, role. So is the Berlin Wall which slashes across its heart, dividing the city into free and Communist sectors. This symbolic division is a constant theme in the movie, turning up in various ways. Angels apart from men; a storyteller with no audience; a woman separated from the love she desires.

It's the story of Damiel and his friend Cassiel, a pair of angels who roam Berlin always on the lookout for people in despair, hurt and pain. They listen mostly, sometimes comfort them with a word, a touch, a friendly arm. They are invisible to everyone except children, but their effect is real.

One day, Damiel spots a small, fleabag circus and goes in. He sees Marion, a trapeze artist who is wearing chicken-wing feathers as she flies over the ring. Damiel is smitten. Over the course of the movie, as he realises he is in love and she is looking for love, he begins to understand that he must make a choice.

This is without question an "art" movie. Most of the film is in black-and-white, the angels' perspective. They don't hear all the traffic and other noises that distract; their world is filled with the quiet sussuration of voices, the countless voices of the souls around them. It's only when we switch to a living human's perspective that color and noise return. It gives the film an appropriate otherworldly feel. But the film is also very slow and deliberate, giving scenes a very long time to play out and encouraging the actors to take their time. This can be trying if you don't get into the spirit, but it conveys a sense of the angels' considered lives and transports viewers to them.

A lot of the movie is set in the main Berlin library. Apparently, Wenders was in love with the building and its spaces, and it shows. He makes the spaces vast and almost cathedral-like. It also serves to make a connection between the books, which tell the stories of our lives and witness to the past, and the angels, who live to experience our lives and to testify to them.

The same goes for the Potsdamer Platz, a former busy marketplace that was pulverised by WWII bombing. It was, at the time the movie was made, still a vast dirt lot crossed by empty roads and scattered with the shells of buildings. It is the stage on which an old man wanders, trying to find the places of his past and to reclaim their memories in order to tell them to the next generation so that they aren't lost.

All the angels -- men and women -- dress alike in long fabric overcoats, buttoned over slacks, t-shirts and dress shoes. Their hair is long and pulled back into a tight ponytail. It's an unusual portrayal, but quickly becomes "right." Their expression are always muted, but run the full range of emotions.

Bruno Ganz is Damiel, and he's a perfect choice. His slightly soft face, with large warm eyes and slightly bemused smile, is frequently seen in close-up to great effect. He's sympathetic and rumpled, welcoming our attachment to his desire. Solveig Dommartin is Marion and is the right face, too. Strong and sensual but not "earthy." Not sexual so much as beautiful. She lives within her body, as an artist and as a dancer, which contrasts with the non-corporeal angels.

I hadn't seen the movie in many years, but had always held it as profound and moving. On watching it last weekend, it was slower than I remembered and a whole lot more pretentious. Dialogue was almost always "literary" and not realistic. On the one hand, it suits the mood of the movie, but on the other it makes everyone sound afflicted by high-mindedness. Again, you have to catch the mood of the movie for this to work.

The DVD I saw is a "special edition" which comes with "lost scenes." In these, and a retrospective featurette, director Wenders gives a lot of insight into how the movie came about. It turns out they started without a script! Most of the movie was made by bits and pieces, following a lot of discussions about what they wanted to do. It was originally a story about two angels, then later came the Berlin setting. The idea of Marion came a bit later. When Wenders realised his movie was becoming too serious, he wrote in some gently comical bits for actor Peter Falk, who plays himself. That was the theme of how this movie came to be what it now is: slowly adding and filling out, allowing others to bring their ideas into the film, being open to whatever they came across. It works, as the film has a great feeling of depth and layers, and of vast inter-connectedness.

Plus, we also learn that the film's original ending was a pie fight! Really! Wisely, Wenders chose to edit that out, but the footage was saved and so we see Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin and Otto Sanders (Cassiel) do a slow-motion Three Stooges routine.

As I said, it's an "art" movie. It's not to everyone's taste, but if you like being transported to places through movies, like immersion in other worlds, and have a high tolerance to pretention, you will find this movie magical and life-affirming. It will skew the way you look at the world, and that's a great thing for any movie to do.