Wings of Desire. - movie reviews

National Review, June 10, 1988 by John Simon

Wings of Desire

AND SPEAKING of slow going, rarely has one seen so much slowness and so little going as in Wings of Desire, an obnoxious movie concocted by the trendy German director Wim Wenders from a screenplay by himself and the even trendier Peter Handke. Handke, the Austrian playwright and novelist, is curiously uneven and vastly overrated. At his best, as when he writes a substantially factual memoir of how his mother ended up a suicide, Handke can write arrestingly, the self-consciousness of his style and the self-servingness of his all-round condescension kept pretty much at bay. But at his worst--and film always brings it out in him--his humorless wit and smugly exhibitionist detail-mongering that ignores larger realities become insufferable. As for Wenders, after a couple of small, rather engagingly disheveled and obliquely affecting road movies, he has turned to ever bigger, figuratively or literally American films, which have landed him in Handkean pretentiousness.

Here the attempt is to create something part fable, part poetic and cinematic avant-gardism, part slaphappy improvisation--with a predictably untidy result. Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, come to Berlin, hover about, observe without becoming visible (though sometimes dimly felt by people), until Damiel relinquishes his angelism to partake fully of humanity--more specifically, to become involved with Marion, a dull and unattractive trapeze artist of whom he is enamored. As the human scene is depicted here, it is only minimally preferable to the angelic one, which appears to be the ultimate in pointlessness and boredom.

Wenders, with the help of the veteran cameraman Henri Alekan, uses every conceivable cinematic trick--in particular irritating changes from black and white to greenish monochrome to full color--while the soundtrack alternates between mundane dialogues and existential-metaphysical monologues of several kinds, the worst of them obsessively refrain-riddled evocations of childhood by Damiel, who seems to be suffering from an advanced Rilke complex.

Peter Falk is on hand playing himself--an American actor making a stupid movie about the collapse of Nazi Germany--and most of his random conversations and voiceover soliloquizings have the awful feel of inept improvisation. We get everything from a travelogue through the seedier parts of Berlin to much milling around the Wall and the desert that once was the Postdamer Platz. There is the good old German actor Curt Bois pretending to be Homer, the paradigmatic storyteller, uttering condign platitudes, and there are long, dull circus sequences for Marion to dangle from ropes, and garish punk-rock-concert sequences in which Damiel, deliquescently played by Bruno Ganz, can blissfully lap up the joys of being human, if that is what Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and their fans are.

Much the worst, however, with the possible exception of the angels' rat-tail hairdos, are the endless voiceover poetasterings, with the perennial refrain, "When the child was a child..." leading into contrasts between the child as child and the child turned adult. On the evidence of this 130-minute mess, there are at least two adults who have succeeded in perfectly perpetuating their childishness on celluloid.