Film: Wings Of Desire
Release date: 28th July 2008
Certificate: 12
Running time: 122 mins
Director: Wim Wenders
Starring: Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk, Solveig Dommartin, Curt Bois, Otto Sander
Genre: Fantasy/Drama/Romance
Studio: Axiom
Format: DVD
Country: West Germany
Wim Wenders’ decision to shoot from an unusual viewpoint, perhaps inspired by Rilke’s meditations on death and immortality, gave birth to a film whose central characters are uniquely placed to examine the human soul and the nature of existence and spirituality.
It takes a certain bravery to create a film with an angel as its main protagonist, to avoid straying into the territory of whimsy. The film’s opening aerial shot is a nod to Capra, as an angel stands on top of a church tower, wings unfurled, as harp music plays and children look up in wonder. But the lives of the citizens of Berlin whom the angels protect are not wonderful. The thoughts of the people, audible to the angels, dwell on miscommunication, death, isolation.
A conversation between the two main characters, Damiel and Cassiel, reveals that the angels are there to bear witness to the spiritual life of humanity. This often takes the form of small, delicately observed incidents – a boy telling his schoolteacher how a fern grows, a station guard on a sudden fancy calling out “Tierra del Fuego” instead of the station name. The angels stand by those in need and provide invisible yet tangible comfort. Only children can see the angels – the film’s recurrent litany of Peter Handke’s poem Lied vom Kindsein (Song Of Childhood) speaks of the importance of dreams and questioning in childhood (“als das Kind Kind war” - when the child was a child), and the openness of children to the existence of things beyond the material world.
The central character, Damiel, speaks of his desire to experience being a part of the world, rather than merely an observer, and know simple pleasures, such as coming home at the end of a long day and feeding the cat, like Philip Marlowe. When he strays into a circus showground and encounters Marion, the trapeze artist, despairing that the circus has to close and that her dreams may now be at an end, his distress at being an observer, separate from the suffering of humanity, increases.
The film goes on to explore the consequence of Damiel’s desire to be mortal; as well as the human desire to cease living, and the nature of despair, of consolation and the will to persevere and to love…
As a foil to the main storyline featuring Damiel and Marion, the character of Cassiel has a number of scenes with an elderly writer, whose thoughts turn on the nature of writing and the warlike tendency of human nature. He describes the German people as being divided into as many states as there are individuals, each state only accessible with the right passwords. The writer is frail and haunted by memories of the city before the war, but he feels a compulsion to try to write an epic of peace, to counteract all the preceding works that have celebrated warriors and kings. There are recurring images of war – bombers cutting across clouds, buildings in flame, bodies heaped at the side of a road – and an extract of the writer’s work merges straight into a film set, peopled by actors playing Nazi soldiers and refugees. The themes of violence and separation are most obviously symbolised by the forbidding presence of the Berlin Wall – a reproduction constructed for the film, as filming by the Wall itself was not allowed.
Berlin becomes a character itself in the film. Wim Wenders has said that he chose Berlin as it is a place of fantasy, even after the Wall came down, because for years afterwards people still couldn’t quite believe that it had been destroyed. He has said that many scenes came out of the locations, and that he wanted to make the places come alive. This process contributes to the impression of an independent reality to the city outside the scope of the camera lens - that the angels wander the city at random and encounter scenes which somehow reflect the essence of that particular locality.
The music in the film alternates between classical – romantic, stirring and melancholy – and bleak post-punk, which suitably reflects the harsh politics of the time and place. Nick Cave’s songs of death and isolation sit comfortably with the film’s themes, as he sings of eternity and of the carny, whose departure no-one witnesses. The passion of the classical pieces harks back to Germany’s strong romantic tradition in poetry and music, and aptly expresses the yearning of the characters for understanding, meaning and love. In contrast to this, the performances are nicely understated, where any hint of melodrama could have pushed the film’s premise into the realms of the ridiculous.
The angels’ lack of dialogue in scenes with people requires Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander to convey much merely by expression. Bruno Ganz manages to express sympathy, humour and pathos in the leading role, with a childish wonder in some scenes, which is a pleasing contrast to the world weariness of many of the characters. Solveig Dommartin’s trapeze artist fluctuates from sad-eyed despondency to childlike mystification at the world, and how she should exist within it. At the same time, there is an ambiguity in the performances which reflects the uncertainty of the themes explored by the film – we can read an expression of despair or distress but, unlike the angels, not the thought processes behind them. Thought itself, the film seems to suggest, is only an approximate expression of human consciousness.
A melancholy and poetic masterpiece, whose haunting images, powerful music and ambiguous meditation on the nature of existence linger in the memory long after watching. KR
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