"Wings Of Desire"

Most moviegoers likely know the climax of The Devil’s Advocate, in which Al Pacino’s Satan vociferously denounces God as a sadistic prankster who continually tempts Man with promises of pleasure only to hold him back at the last minute by reminding him of the moral shackles that bind him: “Look, but don’t touch! Touch, but don’t taste! Taste, but don’t swallow!” 

Although Satan had humans in mind, his line – the most memorable moment of an otherwise mediocre supernatural thriller – is better suited to describe the condition of angels in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings Of Desire. In biblical tradition, angels are holy messengers who act as intermediaries between Man and God. Subsequent artistic and media portrayals enhance their roles by making them reincarnations of departed souls, guiding the spirits of those they left behind towards a path of righteousness, protecting their lives and/or escorting them on their journey to the afterlife. Here, they are immortal beings who bear witness to our daily lives and record them as a collective memory. Omnipresent and omniscient, they can listen to our thoughts and appear wherever they want. These powers aside, their abilities are limited; while they can provide subconscious comfort to depressed or dying souls, they cannot directly interfere in the course of their lives. This is tragically illustrated when the angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) attempts to use his proximity to prevent a suicidal man from jumping to his death, and fails.

 

Thus Wings Of Desire portrays a world made of walls, the most obvious of which is the permanent invisible one that exists between humanity and angels. But this wall highlights another, less obvious one, which exists between individual humans: From the perspective of angel protagonist Damiel (Bruno Ganz), humans are rarely seen communicating with each other. Most of those he sees don’t even move that much. Rather than talk to one another, they think and worry about whether or not their girlfriend loves them, or whether or not their son will get up and do something with his life. Matters whose exploration would require actual communication between concerned parties, communication Damiel – and thus the audience – never sees. As Professor Ray Carney remarks in his notes on the film¹, it is most appropriate that the film is set in Berlin, a city whose infamous wall typified the tragedy of the Cold War’s alienation of peoples from one another. But as the angels know only too well, it is merely a physical representation, built from the countless emotional and intellectual walls that human beings naturally erect between each other. 

Wim Wenders’s camera – operated by master cinematographer Henri Alekan – witnesses all this with the same omniscience and sad empathy as his angels, gliding slowly above and around is subjects at a respectful distance, calmly observing the gentle irregular flow of human life and emotions but never participating in it. Scenes at the circus, where Damiel falls in love with trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), are exceptions to that rule. Marion and her coworkers occasionally talk to each other, but it is mostly about the circus’s impending closure and departure due to a lack of money. The circus, like life’s greatest moments, is a fleeting island of controlled chaos in a static ocean.

Most of the time, Marion is left to herself, looking and acting like a sad parody of Damiel: Literally "between heaven and earth"², dressed as an angel with small fake wings, and longing for company. When she isn’t practicing her number, she spends most of her time inside her caravan, listening to music and wondering what direction her life will take. As she is alone and keeps most of these thoughts inside her head, Damiel is the only person to know and understand them.

 

Another important subplot involves actor Peter Falk – playing himself – coming to Berlin to shoot a World War II film. Not much is seen of the shooting process itself, it serves mostly as a reminder of Berlin’s past. With archive footage and dialogue, Wenders links personal, everyday struggles and problems to a large and heavy historical past – World War II, the Holocaust and the allied bombings. The angels were all here to see it but could do nothing but witness and wonder – passivity comparable to that of ordinary non-Jewish non-Nazi Germans. 

Perhaps this is what drove the fictionalized Peter Falk to accept his part – and use it as an opportunity to observe and draw the people around him on a notepad – as he turns out to be a fallen angel himself. Like Damiel, he could no longer content himself with knowing life intellectually and rationally from above; he needed to experience it carnally. To undergo pleasures and sensations so common to humans that they barely acknowledge their existence, let alone their importance: The taste of coffee in his mouth, the feel of his hands rubbing against each other when he’s cold, the taste and smell of cigarette smoke…

This wonderful role showcases what an underrated actor Peter Falk was. With his hoarse New York-accented voice and keen attentive eye, he always seemed an old soul; someone with a long and rich emotional life and plenty of time to reflect upon it. It is quite impossible to imagine anybody else who could have played such a part with such natural ease.

 

His love for Marion and the same envy Falk once felt eventually drive Damiel to renounce his immortality and become human. There are two stages to his fall: First, a simple pan from right to left while the photography goes from black & white (right) to colour (left) – as it has done previously to indicate a human point-of-view. Then, after a peaceful establishing shot and pan show him lying on the ground the morning after, he is woken in a way that is as sudden and brutal for the viewer as it is for him: The loud clanging of a metal coat of armour hitting his head just a second after a close-up of his face.

After an encounter with a stranger who helpfully introduces him to different colours, the camera follows Damiel on his way to a pawn shop in a long tracking shot. It is there that we notice another major difference from the way he and the world were filmed when he was an angel: Rather than gliding independently, the camera movements are now quite ostentatiously motivated by his own movements. Sounds are louder and clearer, signifying his clearer perception of the world in its totality.

After selling the coat of armour that was mysteriously dropped on him, Damiel ditches his angel uniform to buy different clothes. It is perhaps because his ability to see colour is so recent that his new wardrobe is so tacky: His loud tacky jacket, old grey hat, grey trousers and striped black, grey & white tie are comically mismatched. At this point, the beauty of Bruno Ganz’s performance shines through more than ever as the marvel of subtlety that it is: As an angel, he speaks very little. His eyes and posture express compassion and controlled longing. When, as a human, he arrives at the circus where Marion worked only to find an empty circle, he jogs around it, kicking the sand in anger and frustration with each stride much like an agitated child would. For a child he is, as far as tactile knowledge of the world goes. He is not unlike the child from the poem that opens the film and is repeatedly quoted by him; ephemerally happy with a life devoid of worries, fear or pain, yet hungry for existential knowledge.

After many efforts, he finally locates Marion at a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds concert where he saw her earlier and the two greet each other as if they had always known each other – echoing the feeling of lifelong kinship many couples share. In a long, pensive monologue, Marion speaks of the loneliness she’s felt her entire life and of the positive loneliness she desires to achieve with a man and achieves with Damiel: To be lonely with him means to open herself to him and let him know her in every sense of the word. Communion with him means communion with the entire world.

That monologue holds the key to the closest thing Wings Of Desire has to a solution regarding the isolation of humans from one another. Unlike the well-acted and occasionally entertaining but comparatively shallow American remake City Of Angels, this isn’t a case of love conquering all. Rather, it is the meeting of two people who share the same fundamental and deeply human desires – to love, be loved and experience life at its fullest – while coming from two contrasting perspectives. In doing so, they achieve a symbiosis of sorts. As Marion puts it, they’re “representing the people now”. It is through this sharing of perspectives, this marriage between intellectual knowledge and hands-on experience that people have the best shot at better understanding each other and breaking down their emotional barriers.

^{1, 2}http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/newsevents/wingsofdesire.shtml.