| The 1987 film Wings of Desire, about an angel who falls in love and turns his back on immortality, was almost singlehandedly responsible for the "new spirituality" of the 1990s, a pop culture phenomenon that reached its nadir with the film’s Hollywood remake, City of Angels.
Fifteen years on, Wim Wenders’s original has lost none of its power. Its strengths are still deeply moving, but its weaknesses are also still profoundly embarrassing. Given the nature of contemporary audiences, it seems almost inconceivable that a film such as this should once have been able to reach a relatively large North American audience.
The big problem is that this is, above all, a literary film – not in the sense of a Merchant Ivory production or a Henry James adaptation, but in that there is almost no dialogue, only monologues crafted by one of the German language’s leading poets, Peter Handke.
These texts are the driving force of the film, but they do not dominate it – an equally important component is the cinematography of French veteran Henri Alekan, whose best-known previous work (other than Roman Holiday) was in 1940s films by Jean Cocteau and Marcel Carné.
While Alekan re-creates the atmosphere of those films (Wings is shot mostly in black-and-white), Wenders uses the greater clarity and mobility of contemporary technology to transform this into something profoundly modern: the first half of the film is essentially a "stream of collective unconsciousness" overview of postwar Germany, with the angels eavesdropping on every aspect of human despair.
It is also something of a stretch to call this a love story – the film ends at the point where Damiel (Bruno Ganz), the angel, finally meets Marion (Solveig Dommartin), the woman with whom he had fallen in love, and Marion’s concluding monologue makes it clear that her decision to embrace him is something closer to Pascal’s closely reasoned metaphysical leap of faith than to any conventional romantic impulse.
Needless to say, most of this was left out of the remake – which, as usual, tells us more than we wish to know about Hollywood’s view not just of the world, but also of heaven.
With the benefit of hindsight – and even at the time, it was clear that mistakes were made – Peter Falk’s role as the angels’ earthbound friend is an incongruously cutesy bit of business. I was shocked to find that when Wenders considered dropping it, it was championed by his assistant, Claire Denis, who has since become one of Europe’s leading cinematic lights. The extended musical numbers by Nick Cave and Crime & the City Solution also date the film a little too accurately for comfort, though it can be argued that their histrionic goth-rock is as important an element as any of the Cold War Berlin psyche.
Still, flaws and all, Wings of Desire is one of the essential films of modern cinema – having it at last on DVD will give viewers the opportunity to pay closer attention to the extensive subtitles Handke’s text requires, which often got skipped over in the theatres. |
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