When this child was a child, in the 1980s, the word “Berlin” evoked, not without a certain dark romance, the world-defining division between the US-led Free World and the grim, if vast, confines of the Soviet bloc. In Berlin, the liberal, capitalist West persisted despite being encircled by and ensconced deep within the GDR, a kind of pre-AfD alternative Germany–a utopian project whose grand post-War ambitions had long since curdled into paranoid self-dealing and willful delusion. And then the Wall came down, and Berlin became, within a few years, one more capitol among many humming along in the expanding EU.
But here in a present-day scarcely imaginable just yesterday, it’s no secret that the geopolitical heatmap is back on the shift. Is everything cold new again? Not exactly, but there certainly is a chill in the air. Trump’s ascendance and Putin’s persistence may point to a resurrection, by hubris and fiat, of an alliance that seemed dead and gone within a few years of the end of World War II, albeit radically recast in character for the new century. In this suddenly plausible configuration, the US and Russia, under cover of the fight against terrorism and in concert with national populist parties, would freeze out liberal European democracy from either side.
Under siege at the center? The unlikely beacon of Berlin, where, if anywhere, and at least for now, E Pluribus Unum remains a living principle. For 1987’s Wings of Desire (released in Germany as Der Himmel über Berlin, or “The Heavens over Berlin”), Wim Wenders perched himself and a pair of angels just above the great, riven city, gazing down in rue and wonder upon its messy maze of lives, and listening in on its unruly hive of minds.
Within Berlin’s one sky, Wim Wenders gives us several skies, as inhabited by souls in various, ambiguous states of anxiety and grace. There is, among others, a pair of angels (Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) delighting in but growing tired of their task of cataloging the “spiritual” thoughts and impulses of the city’s mostly world-mired denizens; a trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) perfecting her routine even as she learns that her circus is, once again, being retired; and an American actor (Peter Falk, who plays Peter Falk, but also sort of Columbo, while representing America, and pop culture, and the German diaspora) flying into Tegel airport to work on a film. Why, there’s even a demon–not really an adversary, rather a rancid reminder of the abyss’s abiding pull for us mortals–in Nick Cave, who evinces utter mesmeric command in these early days of his Bad Seeds prime.
Co-written by Peter Handke, whose poem “Song of Childhood” recurs throughout, Wings of Desire–widely considered the last of Wenders’ great feature films–shares some qualities with the pair’s Road Trilogy collaborations from the mid-1970s. But it takes those qualities–in particular a musingly discursive, wanderer-in-a-sea-of-mist, history-haunted loneliness (the Germans call it “sehnsucht”)–and inflates them with grandeur. Wings of Desire is, as many have said in so many words, ravishingly beautiful. It invites us to revel and reel in its aerial views of the city, to partake in the reverential awe with which our reality-hungry angels observe us (whether from the clouds high above or with their heads on our shoulders), and, finally and perhaps least successfully, to experience with Damiel (Bruno Ganz’s angel) the ecstasy of falling into time and matter attendant upon his falling in love with trapeze-artist Marion.
Shifting between angelic monochrome and the vivid, even chaotic color of the incarnate, Wings of Desire seems, unless it’s just me, or the times, to gesture towards a balance between orders of nature that would preserve the wonder of childhood within a network of care, relation, and responsibility. I guess we could call it maturity. Let’s be on the lookout for it somewhere between the streets and the skies above our own fair cities. We might want to start in the libraries.
Wings of Desire
1987
dir. Wim Wenders
128 min.
Screens Saturday, 2/11, 2PM & 7PM @ Brattle Theatre
Part of the ongoing series: Great Romances
Double feature w/ Amelie (4:30, 9:30)
