SO CLOSE! FARAWAY Movie Review
In Weiter Ferne, So Nah!
He just couldn't leave well enough alone. The “well enough” I refer to is Wim Wenders's delicate and miraculously successful 1988 Wings of Desire, the story of an angel (Bruno Ganz) who chooses to fall to earth in a divided Berlin in order to experience—even if for a relatively short time—the sensory and emotional pleasure and pain that we all tend to take for granted. Faraway, So Close! is Wings II, in which Ganz's angelic buddy from the first film, Cassiel (Otto Sander), decides to take the fall himself. It's now a very different Berlin, of course, and though the fetid and spiritually bereft underside of this new city is probably the very thing that caused Wenders to revisit the story in the first place, it's also what makes Faraway, So Close! such a downer. Things don't work out neatly for Cassiel, and if there's a symbol of moral bankruptcy that he doesn't run into—be it pomographers, gangsters, or black market weapons—I'll be darned if I can remember it. Bruno Ganz is back from the first film, as are Solveig Dommartin and Peter Falk. Lou Reed shows up—why not? Mikhail Gorbachev drops in as well. (You don't want to know.) Faraway, So Close! isn't truly awful, but it is truly unnecessary. It's a tribute to the originality and strength of Wings of Desire that the memory of that film is in no way diminished by this one—nor by the cloying American remake City of Angels. (Faraway, So Close! originally clocked in at 164 minutes. It's had 24 minutes trimmed since then, yet is virtually indistinguishable from the long version. This should tell you something.)
NEXT STOP … Wings of Desire, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Carousel
1993 (PG-13) 146m/C GE Otto Sander, Peter Falk, Horst Buchholz, Nastassia Kinski, Heinz Ruhmann, Bruno Ganz, Solveig Dommartin, Ruediger Vogler, Willem Dafoe, Lou Reed; D: Wim Wenders; W: Ulrich Zieger, Richard Reitinger, Wim Wenders; C: Jurgen Jurges; M: David Darling, Laurent Petitgrand. Cannes Film Festival '93: Grand Jury Prize; Nominations: Golden Globe Awards '94: Best Song ("Stay"). VHS, LV, Closed Caption COL