Following the sensational international success of 1987’s Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders had something like carte blanche to make the film of his dreams. The carte didn’t stay blanche for long. For his next project, Wenders the road-movie king embarked on a globe-spanning, years-gobbling odyssey, finally re-emerging in cinemas in 1991 with a severely truncated version of Until the End of the World, which screens tonight at the Brattle in a restored, remastered, nearly five hour long director’s cut.
Should you go see it? I expect you’ve already decided, but if you haven’t, the critical question may be this: What did you think of the scene near the end of Wings of Desire in which Bruno Ganz and Solveig Dommartin gaze intensely into and through one another while spouting airily cosmic, romantic profundities about life, love and the universe? (To wit: “We are now the times. Not only the whole town… the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We’re representing the people now…) If that scene represented the peak of the movie for you, you have to see tonight’s film.
Otherwise, proceed with caution. Australian novelist Peter Carey co-wrote the script with Wenders, but the dialogue suffers nonetheless from a dispiriting, continual clunkiness, and the voice-over (mellifluously intoned by Sam Neill, who plays a novelist following his wife, Solveig Dommartin, from country to country in pursuit of her new lover, William Hurt) veers towards a kind of ponderous corn. Wenders stuffs his outsized canvas with favorite performers and hobbyhorse themes. So there’s Chishu Ryu (favorite actor of Yasujiro Ozu), Max von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau, Rudiger Vogler (star of the director’s mid-Seventies road trilogy), etc.; and then there’s the replacement of word by image, experience by simulation, beauty by representation, and, ultimately, dreams by dream-recordings.
This last is the explicit plan of mad (but well-intentioned) scientist Max von Sydow in the film’s last third, which takes place in the Australian outback after “the end of the world,” precipitated by nuclear fallout from America’s destruction of a rogue, Earth-orbiting Indian satellite. Something like that. This segment of the film, in which our leading lovers, Dommartin and Hurt, lose themselves to an absolute absorption in handheld devices running loops of their dreams, contains images and sequences of ravishing strangeness and beauty. They may even manage to confer the ungainly, unconvincing genre-dithering of the hours that precede them with a theretofore indiscernible emotional resonance and intellectual heft. They may. Or, by then, you may just need to believe so. So go ahead, believe. I think I do.
Screening as part of the touring series, playing locally at the Brattle, Wim Wenders: Portraits Along the Road
