Der Himmel über Berlin

Wim Wenders (1987)

It has a very unusual storyline and a very distinctive look (at least in the monochrome sections which make up most of the film).  But the discrepancy between the technical sophistication of the images and the quality of thought behind the words is chasmal.   Cassiel and Damiel are two angels who watch over the denizens of contemporary Berlin (in other words, Berlin just before the Wall came down).  They are unable to effect big changes in the Berliners’ lives or – as we see in one sequence – prevent the most unhappy from ending them; but when a human being is touched by one of the angels, he or she feels an immediate (if transient) inner strength.  Damiel finds himself increasingly drawn – through his feelings for a French trapeze artist called Marion, who’s appearing in a circus in the city – to partake of human experience.  Well over two thirds into the film, he enters into real life, at which point the black-and-white film is replaced by colour (until this point there have been just a few, momentary colour shots).

Wenders has said that the screenplay, which he wrote with Peter Handke, draws on themes in Rilke’s writings but this strikes me as cultural one-upmanship.   A Google search on Rilke quickly brought up some very apposite text (from one of his letters – ‘when people remained alien to me, I was drawn to things, and from them a joy breathed upon me … Oh, how I believe in it, in life’) but the themes in Wings of Desire are not as singular as imputing them to Rilke suggests.   It’s hardly unusual in mythology or literature for a non-human (like the Little Mermaid) to yearn for human communion.  It’s verging on a cliché for supernatural entities (like ghosts) to be shown as subsisting on a superior plane but in a life that is sadly attenuated.   We hear throughout the film lines from a ‘Song of Childhood’, written by Handke.   I don’t know if this was conceived as a homage to Rilke but what it has to say is familiar from elsewhere too:

‘When the child was a child,

It was the time for these questions:

Why am I me, and why not you?

Why am I here, and why not there?

When did time begin, and where does space end?

Is life under the sun not just a dream?

Is what I see and hear and smell

not just an illusion of a world before the world?’

The last part of that (short) excerpt gives away the carelessness of the any-existential-insight-will-do approach of the writing in Wings of Desire:  unlike the questions in the third, fourth and fifth lines, those in the last three are not the sort of questions which are asked in childhood.  In the early stages of the picture, I couldn’t work out who was actually speaking these words.  Quite soon, I realised it didn’t matter because anyone with anything important to say – whether quoting from Handke’s poem or reflecting on their life – talks in the same way.  I’m not saying it’s easy to write this kind of stuff; I do think that (as with the script for Last Year at Marienbad), once you’ve got the hang of it, you can keep going for a long time.   This is certainly what happens in Wings of Desire.  Marion, when she’s not on the high wire or dancing miserably alone in a club where Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are playing, has a chronic case of this ontological incontinence.  The only counterpoint to the musings on existence is provided by the thoughts of Berlin commuters et al which the angels tune into.  These fragments are consistently significant and miserable:  if anyone in Berlin had a thought as believably mundane as ‘Must remember to pick up a pint of milk on the way home’, I was drowsing at the time.

The mournful, alienated existence of the Berliners makes it hard to see why Damiel is so anxious to join the life of the city.  And since Marion maunders on the most relentlessly – as if determined to show who’s boss in a Franco-German contest in metaphysical gloom – it’s all the harder to see why she ignites this Sehnsucht in him.  Although you get an immediate lift when Wenders switches to colour, it’s short-lived:  it’s not hard to predict that life beyond monochrome, in his scheme of things, is unlikely to be life in Technicolor and so it proves.  What you also rightly suspect is that from this point onwards the film will begin to resolve itself as a story and that, in the process of doing so, will expose its naffness:  what’s gone before – lacking narrative shape or momentum but visually arresting and irritatingly hypnotic to listen to – has kept this under wraps.   When Damiel, in the real world, returns for another performance at the club in the hope of meeting Marion, they find each other (literally and metaphorically) in the adjoining bar.  They embrace and she launches into a monologue, for Damiel and the camera, which is no different from the internal monologues we’ve heard from her before – except that it’s even longer and heavier on baffling paradox and is supposed to be conclusive.  (It’s lazy writing to have Marion express herself in exactly the same way here.)  What she says raises more questions than it answers – questions like (1) what do you mean by ‘It is only now that I completely belong to you that I feel completely lonely’ and (2) does Damiel really think this kind of interaction is an improvement on being an angel?

How are the actors in a film where normal human possibilities are so rationed?  Bruno Ganz is meticulous but inevitably monotonous.   Once Damiel gets into the world, Ganz’s change of gear is almost too palpable (although very understandable):  when Damiel grins to find that his head is bleeding or drinks coffee or bites into an apple, I received it less as the character gratifying his appetite for sensual experience than as the actor’s relief that he could do something different and more easily expressive at last.  Otto Sander has a good sympathetic melancholy as Cassiel but Ganz is so much stronger a presence throughout that their partnership is very unequal.    Curt Bois, as an old man who wanders round Berlin remembering (and experiencing flashbacks to World War II), does the necessary – this isn’t exactly a compliment.  The blankly beautiful Solveig Dommartin was Wenders’s girlfriend at the time the film was made so perhaps it’s not surprising that he couldn’t see that her performance as Marion is both tedious and shallow.  When we see Ganz’s Damiel in colour, his face does seem transformed, and in a way you can’t quite fathom.  Until she starts talking in the bar, Dommartin too seems strikingly different from her monochrome incarnation but this isn’t, as it is with Ganz, a result of the actor’s craft; it’s more that her earlier characterisation was so superficial that it’s easy to erase.  Dommartin’s Marion is altogether a being much less substantial than the discarnate angels.

Peter Falk, playing an American actor identical to Peter Falk who’s in Berlin to make a picture, is likeable in a way that none of the others is.  Given Wenders’s subject, it’s amusing (whether intentionally amusing I’m not sure) that the audience at Wings of Desire becomes so numbly detached that taking an interest in the people on screen gets to be highly desirable:  taking a leaf out of Damiel’s book, we long to attain the experience of film-watching that ordinary cinemagoers can enjoy.  Because Peter Falk is a familiar face and voice – and gets some humour into his lines – he soon acquires a magnetic warmth.  This isn’t the only thing in the film that works well as some kind of joke.  We have a clear, art history idea of what an angel looks like.  The appearance of Cassiel and Damiel is very different but equally standardised (long dark overcoats, pony tails); they look like people with a well-defined job to do.  And since Falk is playing ‘Himself’ and turns out to be an angel in human disguise, it will no longer be possible to look at a Columbo repeat in the same way.  These moments of light relief are rare, though, and were water in the desert for the NFT1 audience.  The few opportunities for laughter were seized upon desperately, uproariously – as when some German teenagers passed by Falk and decided it couldn’t be Columbo because of the moth-eaten coat he was wearing or, some time later, when Damiel became human and got a new set of clothes.  (That outfit did make me smile – its carefully assembled tastelessness really justified Wenders’s use of colour for a moment.)

As we were leaving the BFI, Sally said, rightly, that it wasn’t my kind of film.  (I didn’t think it was hers either but she really enjoyed it – if not as much as the guardian angels car commercial that it inspired a few years ago.)  I don’t have the ability to appreciate the visual achievements of something like this – and the visuals aren’t enough to sustain me for two hours in the cinema.  I don’t like a surfeit of words when they’re spoken not by characters but by actors on behalf of film-makers.  I can get by without circuses in life or on screen.  But although I’m not naturally responsive to this kind of picture I still don’t think Wings of Desire is that good.   For example, when Wenders stages the circus or punk rock performance scenes and shows their audiences deep into the experience, it’s not convincing.  These sequences don’t have the texture of the real thing – they come over as the director’s unfelt idea of what it’s like going to events like these.  (Is that clinical unreality intentional?  If so, I don’t get the point.)  My stepson’s friend (neither he nor she liked the film) asked afterwards if Wenders directed Buena Vista Social Club – or was she confusing him with someone else?  I said I thought she probably was but that I didn’t know.  I see from Wenders’s filmography that I was wrong:  Buena Vista Social Club is a documentary he made about Cuban musicians.  Perhaps it’s only when he’s recording  rather than trying to recreate performance, that Wenders can convey the vitality of performers – he does so in Wings of Desire solely through the person of Peter Falk.

4 October 2009