The extras-rich Criterion Collection version of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) is perfectly timed to seize the moment. The subject of the film is dividing lines—between fallible humans and the guardian angels who look after them, the living and the dead, the past and the present, real locations and movie sets, and so on. But it’s the division that no longer exists that gives the film its lasting appeal.
The German title of the film translates to The Sky over Berlin. In the sky are angels—not heavenly emissaries, but secular beings, who, like Superman, eavesdrop on our babble of chatter, complaints, and regrets, and swoop in to lend a non-judgmental, comforting, and invisible hand. (Composer Jurgen Knieper used cellos, rather than harps, to make the angels less god-like.) The story, largely improvised by Wenders but with voiceover narration, poetry, and dialogue by the Austrian playwright and novelist Peter Handke, concerns two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander). Cassiel hangs back, observing and recording human behavior, and finds a good subject in the aged storyteller Homer (played by the veteran character actor Curt Bois, familiar from Casablanca, in his last role). Damiel, meanwhile, is drawn to direct human experience, including an afterlife-changing encounter on a film set with the American actor Peter Falk, who plays himself. He finds himself longing to leave behind the monochrome world of the angels once he meets the beguiling but lonely trapeze artist Marion (played by Wenders’ then-girlfriend, Solveig Donmartin).
Wings of Desire, which won Wenders the best director prize at Cannes, was an arthouse smash in 1987, but I can’t say I was crazy about it. Back then I preferred films with meatier storylines; I wasn’t into films that primarily gave off a vibe. And I still don’t like it as much as the films that established Wenders as a ranking member, along with Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, of the revolutionary German cinema of the 70s, like Alice in the Cities (1974) and The American Friend (1977). A movie with angels, circuses, and an improvised script can’t help but be whimsical, or fall in love with itself, and Wings of Desire is guilty on both counts. (more…)
