"They say that time heals all. But what if time itself is the disease?"

-- Marion (paraphrase), in _Wings of Desire_

In Wim Wenders' art-house blockbuster _Wings of Desire_, the aging story- teller Homer lamented the changes in himself and his city since the war.
His voice was gone, his favorite cafe in Potsdamer Platz had turned into
a muddy no-man's land. He is, needless to say, the perfect stand-in for
us moviegoers, forever condemned to judge films through our evolving, nostagia-tinted lenses. The following is then, inevitably, my story about _Wings of Desire_, encountered on the big screen again after 25 years.

I used to hate _Wings of Desire_ with a passion. This was Wenders' sell-
out. The director used to be the guardian angel of those afflicted with wanderlust. His wayward protagonists were alienated from their heritage (partly because of the Nazi past, as_Wrong Move_ made clear), condemned
to eternal spiritual quests, . They were forever searching for something
not even they could comprehend. Along the way they documented the
exhaustion of backwater towns from the Black Forest to the Mojave desert,
but also recorded the poetry, the extraordinary sights and sounds of those landscapes, and the humor and warmth (no matter how transient) of their travelling companions.

The angels in _Wings_ were metaphors for these lost souls. When Damiel
(Bruno Ganz) shed his wings to shack up with the lovely trapeze artist
Marion, ending the film in a domestic bliss that was shut off from the
world -- in a windowless room Wenders' former altar ego Rudiger Vogler
would have been never be caught dead in -- the director was announcing
he was settling down, turning his back on his disciples. Politically,
_Wings_ was also concilitory; it was devoid of guilt about Germany's
war crimes or its economic miracle (indeed it treated the Nazi question
as a joke, a "Columbo" movie).

Looking back, I did not regret my indictment. But Wenders' is a trajectory common to most angry-young-men turned art-house megastars. Wong Kar-Wai morphed from anti-capitalist rebel, self-exiled all over the world, to
defender of Hong Kong's cultural legacy. (Like Wenders, he ran out of
things to say after his grand reconciliation testimony _2046_, a masterpiece
to rival his _Ashes of Time_). Terrence Malick's films evolved from the Existentialism apotheosis _Days of Heaven_ to an unexpected new height in
_The Tree of Life_. If these directors had not grown more life-affirming, perhaps even conservative and bourgeois, one would have questioned their intellectual curiosity and honesty.

The Wenders retrospective travelled near where I lived; I made it a point
to catch _Wings of Desire_. I was stunned by the generosity of its first two-third. Screenwriter Peter Handke wrote like an angel, giving voice to
the old and the sick, to those in despair, contemplating suicide. (Sadly
the interior monologs of foreigners and Arabs were omitted from the English subtitles.) The angels listen to their thoughts but were powerless to
help. Yet this melancholy was balanced by the sheer joy and optimism percolating in the thoughts of the many children in the film. In the
evenings Damiel and Cassiel compared nots and shared the wondrous sights
they recorded on the day, the high point being their reminiscence of the
birth of life on the planet, and the Dawn of Man. Their solemnity was silhouetted against the down-to-earth levity of Peter Falk's cameos.
Despite its intentionally loose structure, the _Wings of Desire_
screenplay was extremely well-heeled.

One encounter with Marion and Damiel fell from Heaven. She was an
aspiring, soulful trapeze artist, played by Solveig Dommartin with
astonishing athletic grace. Wenders once claimed that the actress
learned the circus moves from scratch and did all her stunts without a
safety net. This story was probably embellished, but there was no
denying that Dommartin's divine beauty, youth, and vitality bestowed
on the film cinematic immortality. Damiel spent more time around her travelling circus, attending to her thoughts, and she instinctively
sensed his supernatural presence. The film ended on the angel's transubstantiation and their enigmatic vows to each other in a bar,
Nick Cave playing in the background.

Wenders' films used to all end on long monologs by the protagonists. (A
noted exception was _Alice in the Cities_, a film so perfect that it
needed no explication.) Peter Handke regretfully gave Dommartin an over-the-top declaration, likening their heterosexual love as harbinger
of a new shining example for mankind. I used to think it was gibberish;
now I recognize that the writer needed a show-stoping Ode to Love
to surpass the extraordinary lyricism that sustained the film until then.
He was striving for old fashioned German Romanticism. But the speech
had a "Master Race" connotation, particularly unfortunate in a film
that only made passing reference to the WWII destruction wrought by,
and on, Berlin. Dommartin had a stunning screen presence, but lacked
the craft to give wings to the lofty language (think Nastassja Kinksi's
elegant monolog at the end of _Paris, Texas_ for what could have
been). Nevertheless -- in hindsight -- if Wenders came to believe
that the beauty and grace of women was our salvation, well that was
a bourgeois, middle-aged fantasy, but was it really more egregious
than my blind faith in the assigning Truth and Purity to the
disaffected youths who populated his older films?

I was astonished by how much _Wings of Desire_ anticipated Terrence
Malick's new-found aesthetics. The film revelled in the rapturous
joy and chaos of young children; the angels' History of Time
reminiscence recalled the CGI-generated evolution time-lapse in
_The Tree of Life_; _Wings_ and _To the Wonder_ featured similar
visual motifs, like the skeins of migratory birds filling the
sky; Wenders even referenced van Gogh and his Sunflowers, just
as Malick would in _Tree_. But the German could not follow through
with this new way of seeing. His subsequent films got lost in genre explorations and star-struck Hollywood pastiches. Malick, ever
the greater intellect, parlayed this insight into a new cinematic
form; he grew from an emotionally opaque Impressionist into a
child-like van Gogh, and became the greatest filmmaker of the decade.
This could have been Wenders' trajectory; what a missed opportunity!

But it is easy to forgive the minor flaws of Wenders and his _Wings
of Desire_. The passage of time had bathed this one-of-a-kind film
in an amber glow quite unlike any other. Solveig Dommartin passed
away at age forty-five after a short career and a long retirement.
She was bursting with health and vitality then; it was shocking she
could ever die. The autumnal Otto Sander also recently passed away.
Peter Handke has since disgraced himself in the Yugloslavia Civil
War, ensuring his poetry would never again complement Wenders'
visual mastery. The latter lost himself as a filmmaker even as his protagonists found their destinies. Wandering in the wilderness,
he was redeemed by the angelic Michelle Williams in his underrated
post-9/11 pilgrimage _Land of Plenty_. As for Berlin, it has
strived. The Wall came down shortly after _Wings of Desire_
wrapped; the Potsdamer Platz again basks in glory, its muddy fields
magically transformed into the glamorous Sony Center. The last time
I saw Berlin, men, women, and children of all ethnicities were
happily mingling at the Brandenberg gate. Maybe it is time for
Wenders to make a true sequel.

(for A.)

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