July 15, 1988 | Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker heretofore best known for gray funks and aimless despair, makes an extraordinary leap of faith in Wings of Desire. From the exquisite pain of his profoundly moving Paris, Texas, Wenders has moved on to exquisite joy, carried along on the wings of angels.
No kidding: In this lyrical fantasy, ingenuously simple yet stylistically audacious, Wenders and co-scriptwriter Peter Handke envision a world watched over by melancholy angels who have nothing better to do with their immortality. Dressed in a drab overcoats, these immortals can overhear thoughts, and offer brief inspirations. But they cannot be seen or heard by most humans. Only true innocents, small children, are aware of their presence.
It’s not a bad life, but not a terribly fulfilling one, either. The angels, who only rarely reveal their wings, see and know everything, but so what? They can do nothing to prevent a suicide, nothing to mend a heartbreak.
Wenders seeks to do nothing less than encompass the entire range of human experience — love, terror, melancholy, remorse, resolve, everything — in the seemingly random observations of his angels in Wings of Desire. He follows immortals on the prowl in contemporary Berlin, a city still scarred by World War II, where most people seem haunted by guilt, or immobilized by ennui, or racked with vague discontents.
But even the gray and desperate lives of the glummest Berliners, Wenders insists, is preferable to the existence of angels who cannot feel, who cannot suffer pain, who cannot even see colors. (Most of the movie is photographed, beautifully, in black and white by the great Henri Alekan.)
Damiel, an angel played by the soulful-eyed, doughy-faced Bruno Ganz, can no longer resist the temptation to hang up his wings. “I’d like to feel there’s some weight to me,” he tells a companion. “To say ‘now’ and ‘now’ instead of ‘since always’ and ‘forever.’”
And, perhaps most important, “Finally, to suspect, instead of knowing all.”
To be sure, Damiel and his fellow angels understand far better than any mortal the anguish of being human: a dying man’s final thoughts of what has made life worth living; a subway rider’s depression as he considers his mother’s failing health; an aging writer’s fears that he has outlived his readers, that mankind as a whole has outlived its need for storytellers. Still, Damiel is more than willing to quite literally take the plunge. Wings of Desire is the story of his fall, and his triumph.
Yes, that’s right: triumph. For in the gospel according to Wim Wenders, delivered by Peter Falk, eternity has nothing to offer so great as the evanescent pleasures of day-to-day human existence. Falk gives a sly and winning performance as an actor named Peter Falk, on location in Berlin to shoot a World War II-era thriller. There’s something childlike about Falk’s zest for life, so it comes as little surprise that he can sense, if not see, angels. And he wants them to know the great news: Life is composed of “so many good things” that balance out the horrors.
“You can have a smoke, or a cup of coffee,” Falk tells the unseen Damiel. “And if you do it together, it’s fantastic!”
And better still, if you can fall in love, it’s transcendent.
“There is no greater story than man and woman,” says Damiel at his most ecstatic moment, giving voice to Wenders’ celebratory romanticism. And Damiel knows what he’s talking about: He falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist, Marion (Solveig Dommartin), who performs in a costume outfitted with fake wings. In her heart, Marion has felt earthbound for most of her life. She, too, must make a wager, must take a plunge. When these two lost souls finally connect, it’s a moment of luminous rapture.
Wings of Desire has more than a few stretches where Wenders appears to be searching for inspiration as desperately as his angels. That’s when the movie can make you restless, and anxious to take flight. But be patient: Just when you’re beginning to fear the film will never regain its buoyancy, it soars again.
Winner of the Best Director prize for Wenders at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, Wings of Desire is often very funny, and always open-hearted. And it ends with an eloquent tribute to the moviemakers — Francois Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu, Andrei Tarkovsky — whom Wenders views as “angels who are no longer with us.” That’s yet another romantic gesture from a director in love with his art, and excited by all the possibilities of life.
