There are some films worth watching just for being such a specific snapshot of one time or place—like Easy Rider to late 1960s California, to what’s probably German New Wave cinema’s most famous outing (besides maybe Paris, Texas if that counts) with Wings of Desire, from Wim Wender.
This is late 80s Berlin just before the Wall finally started crumbling—in a city still divided between bleak urban ruination to the grand green stretches of Tiergarten to clubs and monuments and everything in between. Amid the shadows of brutalist architecture and the specters of history are our two angels come to observe humanity—Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander. Clad in overcoats, and thus looking like many a middle-aged goth you might find wandering present day Berlin, a lot of the first two thirds or so is them listening on a wide variety of Berliners and their thoughts.
Things go from simple apartment dwellers to old grouchy professors, to eventually someone bleeding out on the side of a road accident trying to recount their most pleasant memories. There’s circus performers and street prostitutes, until eventually one of the angels starts to fall for a trapeze artist among the former (Solveig Dommartin). In between these is Peter Falk as a movie director making some sort of WW2 piece in a somewhat meta thing, as part of Berlin history within history or something.
What’s interesting is the sheer cross-section it takes of the city at this time—including of course migrants from Turkey and Pakistan and more. There are poignant sections of an old man wandering a desolated field by the Wall pondering the fate of Potsdamer Platz—which was later rebuilt and thrived once again post reunification, giving this scene a whole new take now. There’s street art and more that doesn’t exist any more, and general feelings of division that one could only get from Germany around this time.
And while there are of course as you might expect from more arty films like this some scenes that go on just a little too long, the real meat is that theme of human connection—between the good and the bad, death and suffering, there’s always that something that we all want to hold onto. A bit meandering as it may seem at first, but as rooted in its time it may seem at first, there’s something in there that feels all the more poignant in these current times…
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