Wings of Desire (1987)
Wings of Desire (1987), directed by Wim Wenders.
(Der Himmel über Berlin, "The Heaven Over Berlin").
Angels watch and record human mortals, listening to their thoughts but not often interfering, sometimes giving just a little subliminal push of encouragement to the lonely and despairing.
The angels wonder at so much they don't know: what it is like to see color, to take off a shoe and stretch your foot under the table, or to be in love.
An angel can become mortal; apparently there is no rule against it. Damiel has been watching a "flying" woman, she works on the trapeze in the circus. He is going to fall and meet her. At the end, after their first night he writes: "Now I know what no angel knows".
The concept could have developed in a precious and overly-sweet way, but that's avoided here and we have a satisfying balance. It is heavy enough that we know we are watching an art film, but lightened with humor and quirkiness. All those lonely people, each a separate world. And yet: it's a love story.
Inspired casting pulls a lot of weight here: the great Bruno Ganz as our troubled angel, lovely Solveig Dommartin as the lonely trapeze artist, and Peter Falk playing himself, an American actor making a war movie in Berlin.
This is the last film for Curt Bois, "Homer", the Storyteller, age 86. He has 127 film credits in the IMDB, starting at age 6, and memorably was the Pickpocket in Casablanca (1942), one of the many refugee actors in that film. "Vultures, vultures everywhere!"
Notes from a recent rewatch:
The angels nod and smile to each other. Are they particularly watching Damiel, aware of his dissatisfaction? And are they watching Cassiel, his friend, toward the end? It's his turn in the next film.
Damiel listens to Marion's thoughts and watches her undress. Which is the greater intrusion? Normally it wouldn't matter with an angel, but Damiel has started to feel desire. This is what pulls him to Earth.
Cassiel cries out in despair when he cannot prevent a suicide, but Damiel, after comforting a man dying from a motorcycle accident, walks away. Does he just not want to be there at the end?
As in A Matter of Life and Death (1946), the angels live in black and white, Earth is in color.
Ganz mugs for the camera when a little girl speaks to him at the circus, but that is not really a mistake: we've been shown that children can see the angels.
Damiel's first response as a mortal? He bursts into laughter when seeing an airplane suspended in the sky.
The brooding cello-heavy chamber score makes us serious minded, the weird angel music -- something like the Monolith wailing chorus in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) -- inspires metaphysical awe, and the circus and pop music brings us back to the ground.
Marion listens to "Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds" to relax. The only music of his I have is "Murder Ballads" which is harrowing. She later meets Damiel at a Cave concert.
As I said for Wenders' Wrong Move (1975), continental philosophy has to be verbalized with a wordiness that tends to obscure the subject. If I were to be lectured on the mysteries of love I wouldn't mind listening to Dommartin, but her five minute delivery honestly feels like twenty.
The swerving changes keep me hooked. We begin with the somber angel monitors and lonely humans, then bring in funny, self-reflective Peter Falk, run away to the circus and fall in love, then switch to color and something like romantic comedy for a thoughtful ending.
You can't separate Berlin from its history in WW2 and the Cold War. The angels are outside of time and history isn't even past for them: it is always now. The stock footage of the wartime bombing looks "dated"; I don't know if we could accept it otherwise. We need history to be in the past, not in the now.
Score by Jürgen Knieper and Laurent Petitgand.
Faraway, So Close! (1993) is a sequel with many of the same characters returning. City of Angels (1998) with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan is an American remake.
Available on Blu-ray from Criterion. Wenders and Falk provide an edited commentary track.
I learned:
Wenders had been away from Germany for years and wanted to make a movie about Berlin. He walked around and began noticing angel art.
There was never a script. You make characters and they find the plot. Peter Handke provided some dialogue and poems and Wenders used those as safe islands, jumping between them and filling in the gaps.
As usual, no storyboards. Many things just developed on the day of shooting. Wenders describes an outpouring of creation that he did not examine until later.
Cinematographer Henri Alekan (Beauty and the Beast (1946), Roman Holiday (1953)) came out of retirement to do the film. He had many ingenious ideas for performing the special effect in-camera as in the old days. He traveled with big suitcases of his own gear and also brought his gaffer out of retirement to help.
Well into production they decided the story was getting too heavy and they wanted a quirky element. Some new character who would be a well-known person. Peter Falk! They got his number from John Cassavetes and pitched him: we don't know anything about the character except he's an ex-angel. Falk was in Berlin the next week.
His sketching and hat selection routine were stuff he did on set that got picked up for the film.
Solveig Dommartin had eight weeks acrobat training. She took a big fall once but immediately got back up into the air. After the movie she had job offers from the circus, partly for that face and those shapely legs, I'm sure. She's gorgeous.
Her acrobat coach from training plays her coach in the film.
The Berlin shown in the film is gone now, torn down and rebuilt after reunification.
They did not have permission to film in the East, but smuggled film to a local cameraman. He would have been in trouble if caught.
The scenes between the Walls were a constructed set. You couldn't film in there and the landmines would have been a problem anyway. They introduced rabbits because rabbits really lived in that space. They were troublesome because they kept fornicating on camera and were hard to catch.
In black-and-white Berlin was a magical, timeless place. In color it became more ordinary.
The end of Paris, Texas (1984) changed his life. He started thinking about love.
Serbian patriot and writer Peter Handke is a controversial figure, despite his many awards including the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. His poem "Song of Childhood" connecting the different parts of the film -- "Als das Kind Kind war..." ("When the child was a child...") -- is available in German and English on the wikiquotes page for the film.
