Berlin, the 1980s. Angels played by Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander are at their preferred location of the Siegessäule (Victory Column), looking down on the Brandenburg Gate with the Alexanderplatz television tower and the East visible in the background. They wear ponytails and a pair of wings is peeking out of Ganz’s standard issue long black jacket.
The camera sweeps with them through tower blocks as we hear the alienated thoughts of all the inhabitants. The angels may be able to hear all these thoughts and put the occasional comforting hand on a shoulder, but they are unable to use their senses or directly influence the “real” world. Later on in the film, an arm round a shoulder is followed by someone jumping to his death. No-one notices them apart from the kids who stare up into the sky when they are flying overhead.
Among the millions of lonely individuals, there’s a new face in town – a character called “the Film Star”, played by Peter Falk. The Film Star’s first name is Peter and he spends a protracted scene trying on different hats, wondering what Columbo would wear. He’s here to play the part of a detective in a film set in war-torn Berlin. In his spare time, he sketches extras with Judensterne pinned to their chest.
Bruno starts to get obsessed with Marion, a trapeze artist and member of a French circus troupe. He attends her performances, enjoying the opportunity to look upwards for a change. He starts to follow her to Nick Cave concerts and to dance with her, even though she’s unaware of his presence. As she lies in bed, he lies next to her. If were to you stop to think, its all a little creepy.
Bruno makes contact with The Film Star, who can’t see him but is aware of his presence. In a monologue addressing the angel that he knows is out there somewhere, The Film Star offers his hand and extols the sensory perception of drinking warm coffee and smoking, preferable both at once. Bruno is gradually convinced to give up all this angel stuff and try to follow a mortal life with Marion.
Wings of Desire looks indisputably superb (I hadn’t noticed before that the first assistant director was the superlative Claire Denis) and sounds good – with a script by Peter Handke and some vital songs by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. But every so often, you worry that you’re sat in the middle of a big con. Not least because I’m sure that the film is loved by all sorts of people who I would hate (basically the same people who think that director Wim Wenders got cooler when he started hanging around with Bono).
And yet, there’s always something that makes you think that this isn’t just meaningless pretension, and that there’s something here worth watching. And the thing that grounds you is almost always Peter Falk. Like Columbo, he’s always there with a wisecrack, ready to prick the bubble of anyone who starts to take this a little too seriously. And when he’s walking through bombsite Berlin and a group of lads shout “Hey, Columbo!”, it is more funny than it has any right to be.
Added to this the film – released 2 years before the fall of the Berlin wall – occupies a specific part of history. Until the very end, we see nothing of the wall itself – apparently filming was banned, so what we do see is a model – yet it is such a very different Berlin to today, more like the bombed out shell in the film that The Film Star is making than anything we know today. I watched it in the open air cinema near Potsdamer Platz, so it was strange to see the same place in rubble on screen.
Wings of Desire works when we don’t spend any time thinking about what any of it is supposed to mean. If we start to try to unpick any of the metaphors I’m sure we would lose the attraction of something that plays in front of us like a symphony. If we appreciate it for what it is, we’ll be happy. But I still can’t help thinking that it may just all be vacuous nonsense.
Second viewing – August 2023
Going into tonight’s showing, I was convinced I’d already reviewed it on this Blog, but put off reading the review because I like to go into a film with an empty brain. But the longer it went on, the more I thought that I can’t have seen it in the 3 or so years that I’ve been writing regular reviews. I didn’t remember large chunks of what was happening. Not just that, I had precious little memory of how I reacted to whatever it was that was happening on the screen.
Now let’s be clear what I mean when I say I don’t remember it. Of course I remember the angels looking down on Berlin. I remember Peter Falk getting a coffee at the caravan Imbiss. And I remember Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds playing From Her to Eternity, while an angel mingled around the concert goers who were oblivious to his presence. i remembered all that but I was still mystified where exactly all this was going.
But maybe that’s the point. Himself über Berlin doesn’t really go anywhere. There’s not much of a coherent narrative. It’s more a set of events that don’t have that much to do with each other apart from sharing a similar general mood. Reading my old review, I see that I wasn’t very impressed by this lack of direction. I was fine with the evocation of a mid-1980s Berlin that no longer exists – that was great – but I wasn’t really sure about the point of the rest of the film.
This time round, I didn’t have so much of that problem, and I think I know why. As it was an open air showing, it was on relatively late. And I’ve had a hell of a week, so was feeling pretty exhausted. I just drifted along and let the film wash over me. It’s not that I fell asleep, but I let my concentration lapse from time to time. So reading the previous review I was surprised about some of the specifics. Although I’d just seen the film, I didn’t remember events or statements that I directly referenced.
And you know what? That may be the perfect mood in which to see this particular film. It has a dreamlike quality – not in a challenging Ari Aster kind of way, but in the sense that although it does have its own internal logic, it doesn’t really matter what happens when. It’s just a group of impressions in no particular order. Now this seems to be exactly what worried me last time round, but as long as you don’t think too hard or ask what the point is, that’s perfectly fine.
I still think that Wim Wenders might be a bit of a fraud, mind, and not just because of the Bono connection. It’s decades since I remember watching one of his films and actually enjoying it (and yet I keep on going back to them, which shows you just how stupid I can be). I’m sure Paris, Texas was great. Wasn’t it? I honestly can’t remember. I saw it around the time it came out and haven’t seen it since. And can’t remember anything much about it any more.
But maybe that is Wenders’s skill – to make films that are so unmemorable that – apart from a few key scenes that stuck in your memory – watching it again is like seeing it for the first time. This may be a good thing – it maximises your enjoyment and surprise (even if there aren’t too many jump scares on Himmel Über Berlin). It’s like the sort of meal that you enjoy while you’re eating it, but when it’s over you’re still hungry and could just eat it all over again.
(There is another possible explanation of course, that my inability to remember what happens in a film is the result of advancing senility, but we’re not discussing that one, thank you very much.)
One of the many problems of trying to award films a certain number of points out of 10 is that it doesn’t account for the fact that our enjoyment of art often depends on how we’re feeling at the time. We appreciate the same film differently on different days. Last time round I thought that Himmel Über Berlin was worth seeing but I couldn’t get that worked up about it. This time I’m saying – go and see it. You won’t necessarily like it, but it’ll do you good. Especially if you’re a bit tired.
CinePhil 