WINGS OF DESIRE Movie Review
Der Himmel Uber Berlin
Even though movie audiences do tend to have strong and immediate reactions to most everything they see, that old cliche “you'll either love this movie or you'll hate it” is especially true of a couple of dozen pictures I know that keep coming up in conversation. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of these (if you're a detractor and are confronted by a fan, it's easiest to simply deny ever having seen it). But for the art house audience, which likes to pride itself on its analytical skills, I know of few movies that provoke the kind of passionate “love it or hate it” reaction as Wim Wenders's 1988 Wings of Desire. The story of an angel (Bruno Ganz) who exists in a monochromatic, non-sensual plane of existence until he decides to forsake immortality and heaven for a good cup of coffee and a pretty trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), Wings of Desire is itself as risky and heartfelt a leap as that which its protagonist takes. Using the divided Berlin that it's set in as a central metaphor, Wings of Desire is a conceptually wacky but powerfully eloquent (and daringly elliptical) meditation on the taken-for-granted human capacity for hunger of every kind: sex (not just dewy-eyed generic “love”) is elevated to the big time here, and sensuality is celebrated in all its forms, rather than reserved as a reward for the deserving. If you squirmed through the flat-footed, literal-minded Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan remake called City of Angels, calm down, take a deep breath, and plunge into Wings of Desire anyway. It just might remind you that it is a wonderful life. With Otto Sander and Peter Falk.
NEXT STOP … Kings of the Road, Mystery Train, Faraway, So Close!
1988 (PG-13) 130m/C GE Bruno Ganz, Peter Falk, Solveig Dommartin, Otto Sander, Curt Bois; D: Wim Wenders; W: Wim Wenders, Peter Handke; C: Henri Alekan; M: Jurgen Knieper. Independent Spirit Awards ‘89: Best Foreign Film; Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards ‘88: Best Cinematography, Best Foreign Film; New York Film Critics Awards ‘88: Best Cinematography; National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘88: Best Cinematography. VHS, LV ORI, GLV, MOV