'When the child was a child...' the film begins, or nearly begins, I can't remember, but it's not a bad place to start, so: when I was a kid of around 19, I saw this movie and thought, 'Naturally, very important, real art, how could you ever say anything against it? I am surely immensely edified etc.' And also, less consciously, 'I absolutely never need to see this movie again.'
As a fully fledged adult who actually has just seen it again, I look back and wonder why I couldn't just condense all that into 'boring, overblown, pretentious.' Because I hadn't seen enough that was really good, I guess. It's odd since some of that better stuff would have been by Wenders: Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities, and, to an only slightly lesser extent, Paris, Texas. It's a bit like thinking Nick Cave is good because you've never heard his earlier, much better band, The Birthday Party.
The bands here are, in fact, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Birthday Party alumnus Rowland S. Howard's subsequent outfit, Crime and the City Solution. Cave, in particular, at this point, had attained a level of humourless self-importance entirely appropriate to the film. However, it's really the beginning of the grandiose tendencies that eventually saw Wenders enmeshed with the much less down and dirty Bono and U2.
The aim is to let us know, in sweepingly epic terms, that human life just...matters - so much so that the really smart and feeling angels will trade their immortality to have a bit of it. Sure, there's pain, loss, longing and even, ahem, boredom, but in the end, when you scan the whole rich tapestry, it's all just so goddamned beautiful - especially when you, you know, take some time to appreciate the little things.
Too much appreciating the little things may be precisely how you make something as trite and tedious as this film, with its overlong wanderings in the Berlin everyday and its angels yearning after ordinary human experience. I am not saying anything against meditation, mindfulness, good photography, lengthened attention spans or heightened awareness in general, I'm talking about getting hung up on trivia. These things you're appreciating may be simple and small, but they're still just material things. If you want more by way of significance than enjoying your coffee and noticing minute, supposedly marvellous random oddments, well...you probably have a point - especially, one might suggest, in a city recently marked by the trauma of an apocalyptic war and now, at the time when the film was made, the embodied metaphor of the geopolitical schism traumatically dividing the world.
At any rate, it's not even a consistent message. Marion, one of the central figures, is a trapeze artist so fogged by gloom she's apt to fall off her swing and her life in sheer resignation at any moment. She is not taking any pleasure in things little or big and seems to have no other internal resources either. Well, not to worry, an angel has fallen in love with her and met her in a dream, and is giving up his wings to come rescue her from her existential black hole. When he finally finds her and is about to kiss her, she holds him off in order to deliver a poetic homily about commitment - that is, to this individual with whom she's barely exchanged a word - so long, over-elaborate and dull I almost worried for her that she was blowing the relationship. It's a paradigm example of the writers - Wenders and/or his long-term collaborator Peter Handke - letting themselves too far off the verbal leash while saying nothing much. And in general, the whole business is very teenage and not in a good way, a fantasy of the depressed person being saved by love - without dealing with or even explaining any of her issues - that, for all the floridly portentous blah blah, is actually phonier and more simplistic than many romantic fantasies purveyed by Hollywood.
Why the six stars and not the one or two all this would suggest? Because of gorgeous execution: beautiful camerawork and great actors giving strong performances. I really didn't mind watching to the end and it's only the next day that the irritation's come on strong enough to incur this review.
But If I had to divvy it up, at least two of those stars might simply be for the kids' circus scene, which is a joy.
As a fully fledged adult who actually has just seen it again, I look back and wonder why I couldn't just condense all that into 'boring, overblown, pretentious.' Because I hadn't seen enough that was really good, I guess. It's odd since some of that better stuff would have been by Wenders: Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities, and, to an only slightly lesser extent, Paris, Texas. It's a bit like thinking Nick Cave is good because you've never heard his earlier, much better band, The Birthday Party.
The bands here are, in fact, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and Birthday Party alumnus Rowland S. Howard's subsequent outfit, Crime and the City Solution. Cave, in particular, at this point, had attained a level of humourless self-importance entirely appropriate to the film. However, it's really the beginning of the grandiose tendencies that eventually saw Wenders enmeshed with the much less down and dirty Bono and U2.
The aim is to let us know, in sweepingly epic terms, that human life just...matters - so much so that the really smart and feeling angels will trade their immortality to have a bit of it. Sure, there's pain, loss, longing and even, ahem, boredom, but in the end, when you scan the whole rich tapestry, it's all just so goddamned beautiful - especially when you, you know, take some time to appreciate the little things.
Too much appreciating the little things may be precisely how you make something as trite and tedious as this film, with its overlong wanderings in the Berlin everyday and its angels yearning after ordinary human experience. I am not saying anything against meditation, mindfulness, good photography, lengthened attention spans or heightened awareness in general, I'm talking about getting hung up on trivia. These things you're appreciating may be simple and small, but they're still just material things. If you want more by way of significance than enjoying your coffee and noticing minute, supposedly marvellous random oddments, well...you probably have a point - especially, one might suggest, in a city recently marked by the trauma of an apocalyptic war and now, at the time when the film was made, the embodied metaphor of the geopolitical schism traumatically dividing the world.
At any rate, it's not even a consistent message. Marion, one of the central figures, is a trapeze artist so fogged by gloom she's apt to fall off her swing and her life in sheer resignation at any moment. She is not taking any pleasure in things little or big and seems to have no other internal resources either. Well, not to worry, an angel has fallen in love with her and met her in a dream, and is giving up his wings to come rescue her from her existential black hole. When he finally finds her and is about to kiss her, she holds him off in order to deliver a poetic homily about commitment - that is, to this individual with whom she's barely exchanged a word - so long, over-elaborate and dull I almost worried for her that she was blowing the relationship. It's a paradigm example of the writers - Wenders and/or his long-term collaborator Peter Handke - letting themselves too far off the verbal leash while saying nothing much. And in general, the whole business is very teenage and not in a good way, a fantasy of the depressed person being saved by love - without dealing with or even explaining any of her issues - that, for all the floridly portentous blah blah, is actually phonier and more simplistic than many romantic fantasies purveyed by Hollywood.
Why the six stars and not the one or two all this would suggest? Because of gorgeous execution: beautiful camerawork and great actors giving strong performances. I really didn't mind watching to the end and it's only the next day that the irritation's come on strong enough to incur this review.
But If I had to divvy it up, at least two of those stars might simply be for the kids' circus scene, which is a joy.