Until the End of the World (Wim Wenders, 1991)

William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin in Until the End of the World 

Cast: Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill, Rüdiger Vogler, Jeanne Moreau, Max Von Sydow, Chick Ortega, Elena Smirnova, Eddy Mitchell, Adelle Lutz, Ernie Dingo, Ernest Beck, Christine Oesterlein, Kuniko Miyaki, Chishu Ryu, Allen Garfield, Lois Chiles, David Gulpilil, Justine Saunders, Paul Livingston. Screenplay: Peter Carey, Wim Wenders. Cinematography: Robby Müller. Production design: Sally Campbell, Thierry Flamand. Film editing: Peter Przygodda. Music: Graeme Revell.

Wim Wenders's almost five-hour-long cut of Until the End of the World may be the most self-indulgent film I've ever seen, and I've seen Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). The original cut of Wenders's movie was 20 hours long, but it was reduced to just under three hours for its first European release and to a bit over two and a half hours for American audiences in 1991. It failed with the critics and the box office. Wenders finally re-edited it to the 287-minute version released in 2015 and now being shown on the Criterion Channel. But it really seems to me to be two movies stitched together by Sam Neill's voiceover narration. The first half is what Wenders himself has called the "ultimate road movie," a characteristic genre for the director of Alice in the Cities (1974), Kings of the Road (1976), and Paris, Texas (1984), starting in Venice and then bouncing to Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, and finally Australia, where it settles for the second half. This half is a sci-fi film about experiments with perception and dreams that take place in the shadow of a potential nuclear holocaust. The first half is often funny; the second half isn't. I'm not prepared to call Until the End of the World a masterpiece, unless it's a masterpiece for cineastes, who can indulge themselves to the fullest in tracing the allusions and influences that shape the movie. The characters played by William Hurt and Solveig Dommartin, for example, spend time in an idyllic setting in Japan where they're tended by characters played by Chishu Ryu and Kuniko Miyaki, actors familiar from the films of Yasujiro Ozu. Hurt's character's parents are played by the iconic Jeanne Moreau and Max Von Sydow. Wenders even evokes his own past by casting Rüdiger Vogler, the star of Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. It's a witty film in many regards, but as I said, self-indulgent. And 287 minutes is a kind of forced binge-watch, which makes me think that Until the End of the World would have made a terrific miniseries for Netflix or Hulu if they'd been around in 1991.

Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987)

Angels are usually a tiresome element in movies. I loathe the stickiness of the way they're conceived in movies like It's a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), and even actors of the caliber of Cary Grant and Denzel Washington can't do much with playing them in films like The Bishop's Wife (Henry Koster, 1947) and its remake, The Preacher's Wife (Penny Marshall, 1996). Maybe it's because I subscribe to Rilke's dictum, Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich -- every angel is terrible. Only a filmmaker of genius like Wim Wenders can transcend the essential cheesiness of their presence in a plot -- a cheesiness that lingers in the American remake of Wings of Desire, City of Angels (Brad Silberberg, 1988). The idea that there are angels watching over our lives, reading our thoughts, but unseen except by other angels and sometimes by children, is not a very original one. But what distinguishes the working out of this idea by Wenders and scenarists Peter Handke and Richard Reitlinger is the empathetic approach to them as beings who have been around since Creation, watching the course of humankind and unable to alter it, and occasionally so moved by what they see that they choose to give up immortality and become human. And that these angels have a specific territory to cover, in this case the city of Berlin, a nexus of human cruelty and human suffering. Even so, the concept could easily slip into banality without the blend of humor and melancholy that Wenders brings to it, without performers of the caliber of Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander as the angels Damiel and Cassiel, and without the poetic cinematography of Henri Alekan. It was also an inspired choice to cast Peter Falk as himself, an actor shooting a movie set in the Nazi era who is often stopped on the Berlin streets by people who know him as Columbo, the detective he played on television. It's also a witty touch to have Falk turn out to be an ex-angel, able to sense but not see the presence of Damiel and Cassiel. In many ways, however, the real star of the film is the city of Berlin itself -- although Wenders was prevented from shooting in the eastern sector of the city, he uses the Wall as a kind of correlative to the division between angels and humans. Almost everything works in the film, including the shifts from monochrome (the angels' point of view) to color (the humans'), the shabby little bankrupt circus whose star (Solveig Dommartin) Damiel literally falls for, and the score by Jürgen Knieper. I'm not hip enough to appreciate Nick Cave's songs, but their melancholy eccentricity is an essential part of the texture of the film.