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Monday, October 25, 2010
Film / Film Reviews / News Wings of Desire soars this week at Charlotte fest
Posted By Matt Brunson on Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 12:44 PM
By Matt Brunson
WINGS OF DESIRE (1987)
DIRECTED BY Wim Wenders
STARS Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk
One of the seminal foreign imports of the 1980s, Germany's Wings of Desire is one of those rare motion pictures that manages to bring a true poetic sensibility to the medium of film. Inspired by the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, writer-director Wim Wenders (sharing script credit with Peter Handke) creates a haunting mood piece whose rich atmosphere is channeled through every aspect of the production, from its direct and understated tagline ("There are angels on the streets of Berlin") to the stunning camerawork (mostly in black-and-white) by Henri Alekan.
The great veteran actor Bruno Ganz, seen more recently portraying Adolph Hitler in 2004's Downfall, stars as Damiel, an angel who hovers over the city of Berlin, observing the world below him. He and fellow angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) are able to listen to the thoughts of anyone and everyone, and their presence is sensed only by small children ... and by Peter Falk. Damiel eventually gets the urge to likewise shed his celestial standing and become a mere mortal once he falls for a lovely trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin).
How brilliant is Wings of Desire? Understand that Peter Falk is playing himself — that is to say, he's playing actor Peter Falk, who happened to be an angel himself until he elected to become human decades earlier. Not until Being John Malkovich came along 12 years later would a film so playfully mix an actor's real-life persona with a reel-life role.
Wenders copped the Best Director prize at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival for this deeply philosophical — and deeply humanist — picture, and once this was released stateside in 1988, it became an art-house hit and earned Alekan Best Cinematography honors from three top critics' groups, with the Los Angeles board further naming it Best Foreign Film. For its part, Hollywood took this unique, one-of-a-kind gem and remade it as 1998's City of Angels, from the director of Casper and starring Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan — surely some studio executive's idea of a sick joke. Wenders himself followed Wings of Desire in 1993 with the far less successful Faraway, So Close! which reunited all four principals and featured special appearances by Willem Dafoe, Lou Reed and — no kidding — Mikhail Gorbachev.
(Wings of Desire will be screened as part of the Wunderkinder: The Directors of New German Cinema series at 7:30 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 26, at the McColl Center for Visual Art. Admission is $10. To see all titles and times, go here. For more info, go here.)
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