ST VALENTINE'S DAY SPECIAL: PERSONAL FAVES: Wings of Desire

Try this one on for size: there’s this angel who gives up his wings, gives up immortality and omniscience for the sake of the woman he’s in love with, a woman who doesn’t even know he exists.

Schmaltzy, right? Complete barf-fest. More Hollywood than Hollywood. And yes, it’s something that Hollywood’s already done – the 1998 Nic Cage and Meg Ryan starrer ‘City of Angels’. And yes, it was a pile of poo.

But, see, this German guy did it first, name of Wim Wenders. Bit of an individualist, like. Does things differently. Try this one on for size: he made this movie called ‘Paris, Texas’, road movie like, but the critical scene in it, the scene the whole movie hinges on, is just a close-up of someone talking for four minutes. Static, you know. Absence of movement … in a road movie. See what I mean?

Same kind of deal with his angel-who-falls-for-a-mortal-woman-and-gives-up-his-wings movie, innit? The angel doesn’t forsake Heaven until the last quarter of the film, doesn’t even talk to the girl until the last ten minutes. I mean, in Hollywood right they’d be up in arms at the script conference, they’d want the angel and the mortal woman lighting up the old post-coital smoke in the first reel. Know what I mean …

Apologies. It would seem that the motor-mouthed little spiv who hijacked the ‘Hell Drivers’ write-up has got in on the act again. Let’s escort him off the premises and hail a passing constable.

Now, where were we?

‘Wings of Desire’ – its original German title ‘Der Himmel über Berlin’ translates as the considerable less poetic ‘The Sky Over Berlin’ – contains enough narrative to fill its closing few minutes. What Hollywood would have taken as a conceptual starting point, Wenders arrives at after nearly two hours of philosophical enquiry; and when he arrives at it, the union of angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin) isn’t a denouement as much as a re-beginning*.

So: two hours of philosophical enquiry. It sounds heavy, and in some respects it is. This is certainly not a film for anyone whose cinematic comfort zone is defined by narrative. It’s probably the closest Wenders – no stranger to long running times and extended takes – has come to what Andrei Tarkovsky called “sculpting in time”. Wenders also sculpts a very specific sense of place. ‘Wings of Desire’ was released in 1987, two years before the Wall fell, and it’s perhaps the most evocative portrait of Berlin as a divided city that cinema has ever achieved.

It sounds heavy, but in many respects it isn’t. You could easily watch it without subtitles, disregard the often portentous dialogue (although most of the film isn’t even dialogue: it’s the overheard thoughts of the people the angels encounter), and be spellbound by Wenders’ astounding gallery of black-and-white images. The film shifts to colour for the end sequence, as Damiel embraces the panoply of human experience. But it’s the black and white sequences that you remember. Wenders’ Berlin, part mythic part shatteringly realistic, is as detailed and memorable and alive as Dickens’s London.

‘Wings of Desire’ is a film-poem: at one an the same time, a hymn, an ode and an elegy. It is pure cinema, from its director’s astoundingly realised vision, to the pitch-perfect humanity of Bruno Ganz’s performance, to its captivating romantic heroine. The radiant Solveig Dommartin, Wenders’ then-girlfriend, also appeared in ‘Faraway, So Close’ and ‘Until the End of the World’ (which she co-wrote), as well as directing the short film ‘Il suffirait d'un pont’. She passed away in France two years ago at the age of forty-five.



* ‘Wings of Desire’ ends with the credit “to be continued”, a promise Wenders made good on six years later with ‘Faraway, So Close’.



i.m. Solveig Dommartin (16th May 1961 – 11th January 2007)

Nicht echt Deutsch: The Reader and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

With ‘The Reader’ up for just about everything Oscar-wise apart from Best Tea-Boy, I feel the need to pull the plug, burst the bubble, spit on the icon and have a word with the sacred cow about McDonald’s.

‘The Reader’ isn’t that good a film. It is, at best, deeply average. The cast is heavyweight (Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, Bruno Ganz, Lena Olin), the cinematography is by two of the best practitioners of the art currently working (Chris Menges and Roger Deakins), the script is courtesy of David Hare and Bernhard Schlink’s source novel a breakout success beyond its original German-language publication, and yet the whole thing never quite adds up to the sum of its parts. As a viewing experience, it’s curiously antiseptic.

I could almost feel sorry for director Stephen Daldry – if, that is, I wasn’t so sure that he’s going to clean up on the 22nd – because the man genuinely seems to want to make profound and thought-provoking films. There was the inexplicably popular ‘Billy Elliott’, which aimed for a triumph-of-the-spirit aesthetic set against the potent backdrop of the miners’ strike. There was ‘The Hours’, with another heavyweight cast and ‘literary’ source novel. But the former was bogged down with clichés – from the gay best friend to the gruff no-son-of-mine father who, awww bless, comes through for the lad at the end – and made ‘Brassed Off’ look like cinema vérité; while the latter was just plain bogged down.

Next up, Daldry is helming an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s ‘The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ and I could weep into my beer that such a wonderful and iconoclastic novel has fallen into his hands. Chabon’s prose deserves a Guillermo del Toro, a Christopher Nolan, a Darren Aronofsky. Not a Stephen Daldry.

I started this blog to rave about the films I love, so wasting words on ‘The Reader’ runs contrary to the remit. Besides, there’s a blandness, a tiredness to it that inspires a similar malaise in yours truly. One of my favourite bloggers on film, Tim at Antagony & Ecstacy, provided an eloquent review of some 1,200 words, and yet summed it up perfectly in his pullquote: “What if they threw a Nazi porno and nobody came?”

Similarly, you could throw at ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’ the question “What if they told a Nazi bedtime story and somebody died?” Okay, I’ll admit it: that was snide. I’m a little more inclined to be charitable to ‘TBITSP’ – it’s adapted from a children’s novel and I’ll make the assumption that director Mark Herman has pitched the film at an audience of similar age range. Not that I saw many children in the audience when I went to see it. They were probably in one of Cineworld’s thirteen other screens, pledging allegiance to Pixar, Dreamworks or Disney. I tip my hat to them.

The problems with ‘TBITSP’ are several. Like ‘The Reader’, it has a director who wants to be serious and challenging but just doesn’t have what it takes to engage with the material. His previous outings, the aforementioned ‘Brassed Off’ and the terminally confused ‘Little Voice’ (is it a comedy? is it a drama? is it meant to be realistic? is it meant to be theatrical? does Brenda Blethyn have to screech all the time?), are not the work of a director ready to tackle the Holocaust.

Never mind if you’re doing it from a child’s point of view, if you’re making a film about the Holocaust then you’re making a film about the Holocaust. That carries as serious a responsibility as any subject a film-maker can pick. A responsibility, first and foremost, to historical accuracy. And yes, John Boyne’s novel is narrated in a deliberately naïve ‘voice’, the better to show the scales falling from his young protagonist’s eyes as he realises the lies his high-ranking SS officer father has told about “Outwith” (his mis-heard name for Auschwitz) are just that – lies – but a novel is a construct of words. Film is visual. So if you’re showing a concentration camp through the eyes of a child, then you’re still showing a concentration camp.

This is where the disconnect occurs in Herman’s film. All of the key scenes between the SS officer’s son and the young Jewish boy, an expanse of barbed wire separating them, take place in some forgotten corner of the camp where no guards patrol, no-one notices anything from the watchtowers, the boy can skive off work detail for long periods at a time and the other inmates in his work gang are unsupervised by guards.

And yet ‘TBITSP’ at least tries to do something, I think. More so than ‘The Reader’, which just says look at me, I’m a profound and important film about a thorny subject, I’d like to thank God, the Academy, my agent … ‘TBITSP’ at least tries to use its child protagonists to make accessible (if that’s the right word) to a younger audience a subject they probably haven’t encountered before and likely have no foreknowledge of. Also it boasts some good performances, most notably from Vera Farmiga – her work here is the equal of anything by this year’s quintet of Best Actress nominees.

Ultimately, though, in the current climate of German cinema demonstrating the fearlessness to tackle its own difficult history, ‘The Reader’ and ‘TBITSP’ suffer from being English-language productions with British directors and chiefly British casts. Had they been made by German directors, I have no doubt that the results would have been a lot more interesting.

The Baader Meinhof Complex

There’s a scene early in ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ in which a group of German citizens are protesting a visit to their country by the Shah of Iran. Although theirs is a peaceful demonstration, the Shah’s supporters start in on them. The ensuing clash attracts police attention and things really get nasty. It’s all truncheons and jackboots and water-cannons and fired shots.

It put me in mind of Jim Sheridan’s ‘In the Name of the Father’, a powerhouse movie but one so determined to stir up outrage in the viewer that the cumulative effect is like being lectured by a coke-fiend for two hours while occasionally getting beaten around the head with a blunt instrument. Heads down, see you at the end, I thought to myself; this one’s going to be a long haul.

Two and a half hours later, still glued to the screen as the end credits rolled, I was in a different frame of mind. ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ impressed and provoked me. But it left me with mixed feelings. Subtle it isn’t – with Uwe Edel directing, it was never going to be – yet somewhere beyond Moritz Bleibtreu’s sneering, swaggering rock star take on Andreas Baader and numerous scenes of brutally realistic violence, some unexpected nuances emerge.

Martine Gedeck’s portrayal of Ulrike Meinhof is one of the film’s grace notes. She effortlessly maps Meinhof’s transition from outspoken journalist to political activist as well as inhabiting her vulnerability, particularly in the trial sequence which provides a gruelling final act.

Bruno Ganz’s thoughtful turn as Horst Herold, seeking to understand the reasons behind the Red Army Faction’s outrages even as his colleagues in the government call for swift and harsh countermeasures, demonstrates the film’s even-handedness. Nor does Edel lionise the Baader Meinhof gang. Their actions are brutal. There are casualties – on both sides. Although Edel lends weight to their ideologies and motivations, he doesn’t try to present a revisionist version of the Red Army Faction as noble, pure-minded freedom fighters. Make no mistake about it: this is a film about a terrorist organisation.

Nor is it all about politics. While Ulrike Meinhof comes across as a woman of intellect driven to desperate action after she discovers that words alone won’t change the world, Andreas Baader is shown as being equally in it for the good of the cause and the perks of the lifestyle: statuesque blonde on his arm*, gun in his hand, cool leather jacket and joyrides in stolen Mercs. Oh yeah, and a few acts of terrorism.

I know very little about the Baader beyond his leadership of the gang. But if the film is even partially accurate, he must have been an insufferable arse. Scene after scene has him throwing a wobbly, either refusing to listen to reason when Meinhof posits ideas and proposals contrary to his (never mind if hers are better thought-out), or getting into a slanging match with PLO members at a guerrilla training camp in Jordan where the Red Army Faction’s free-living ways angers their hosts. It’s beautifully ironic – whether an intended irony or not – that the Red Army Faction seems to get more motivated, and their campaigns more focused, after Baader, Ensslin and Meinhof are arrested and held pending trial.

There’s almost as much nudity and free love as there is revolutionary activity, and it would be almost too easy to accuse Boll of edging into exploitation territory. But I’d like to think it’s part of the aesthetic. ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ is set in the ’70s, and it has an authentic ’70s look and feel to it. Not ’70s-by-design à la Steven Spielberg’s ‘Munich’, but something much more in tune with the edgy, on-the-streets style of film-making of that decade.

Based on Stefan Aust’s non-fiction study of the Red Army Faction, ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ hurtles through a decade of civil unrest, making few concessions to anyone who doesn’t have a decent working knowledge of that period of time. Yours truly, for instance. Supporting characters pop up for key scenes and then disappear. I’m sure some of them aren’t even name-checked. Brigitte Mohnhaupt (Nadja Uhl), a major player in the second generation of the Red Army Faction, doesn’t take the stage until the movie is nearly over.

I’m looking forward to seeing the film again when it makes its appearance on DVD in April, but I’ll be sure to have read Aust’s book first. With the timeline and the key players more firmly defined in my mind, I’m sure I’ll get a lot more out of ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ second time around.



*Gudrun Ensslin, played by Johanna Wokalek - actually co-founder of the group, longer before Meinhof’s involvement.

PERSONAL FAVES: Downfall

Bernd Eichinger is shaping up quite nicely as the enfant terrible of German cinema having produced two controversy baiting epics – ‘Downfall’ and ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ – in the last five years.

‘Downfall’, directed by Oliver Hirshbiegel, was always going to be a hot potato. Not enough that it was the first German film to depict Hitler onscreen, Eichinger and Hirshbiegel drew fire from critics who questioned their portrayal of Hitler in what they saw as a sympathetic light.

Which begs the first question that needs to be asked of ‘Downfall’: does it? I’m not convinced. Hitler (Bruno Ganz in a performance that descriptions like “barn-storming” and “full-throttle” were invented for) is variously shown as a stroppy old git with a hair-trigger temper; an utter delusional, issuing orders for the defence of Berlin and the defeat of the Allies to troops who are either in retreat or have been wiped out; and a pitiful wreck, bent double, hair unkempt, hands shaking.

No, what ‘Downfall’ does is portray Hitler not sympathetically but as a person. And people are fallible. They kid themselves, they fall out with other people, they lose their rag. They fuck up. Adolf Hitler fucked up on a global scale at the cost of millions of lives and untold human suffering. That’s the difference.

Next question: isn’t it a better decision, morally and intellectually, to depict a man like Hitler as just a man – albeit one with a sociopathic disconnect from any standard of normal or responsibly functional behaviour – and not some impenetrable force of darkness with a bristly ’tache and a bad comb-over? Isn’t the usual filmic depiction of Hitler – a scowling, stentorian, fiery-eyed, Hadean presence – actually a cheap and easy way out? Doesn’t this approach effectively reduce him to the status of a pantomime villain, and by extension lessen the enormity of his horrific legacy?

Better by far a film brave enough not to treat the Führer as a set of visual clichés and a square of glue-on bum-fluff on the upper lip. Better by far a film that seeks not to demonise, but neither sympathise; not to try to ‘understand’ Hitler and his actions, but neither deny or obfuscate them; a film, instead, that portrays him. As accurately as possible*.

Working from the books ‘Inside Hitler’s Bunker’ by Joachim Fest and ‘Until the Final Hour’ by Traudl Junge and Melissa Müller, Hirschbiegel charts the final catastrophic days, both in the bunker and on the shell-scarred streets of Berlin, leading up to – and beyond – Hitler’s suicide. That ‘Downfall’ continues for a good 40 minutes after Hitler and Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler) take their lives is telling. And it prompts the next question: is ‘Downfall’ necessarily about Hitler?

In one respect, it can’t not be. Hitler is the hub around which the action of the film moves. Even when he’s not centre-stage. And there are large amounts of screen time where he isn’t. Which is to say: Hitler is a major character, but none of the events are seen through his eyes. I don’t think a film could achieve that – not without straying into morally dubious territory.

‘Downfall’ is told from the perspectives of Traudl Junge (Alexandra Maria Lara), Hitler’s secretary**; humanitarian physican Professor Ernst-Günther Schenck (Christian Berkel); and a young boy drafted at an absurdly young age as part of an anti-tank patrol operating on the streets of Berlin and under almost constant fire from the approaching Russian troops. The title doesn’t refer just to Hitler’s downfall – his and Braun’s suicide is just one of many; the film is awash with high ranking officials, as well as mid ranking officers, putting guns to their heads or pulling the pins on hand grenades; the most unflinching scene has Goebbels’ wife Magda (Corinna Harfouch) poison their five children before he shoots her then turns the gun on himself – it’s the downfall of a government, a Reich, a monstrously misconceived political ideal; it’s the downfall of a city and its inhabitants; it’s the downfall of, to quote a line from Wilfred Owen, “half the seed of Europe”.

It’s bitterly and brutally honest; utterly unforgettable. It’s a German film.



*To the best of my knowledge only the final scene, detailing Junge’s escape through the Russian lines, is purely fictional.

**The opening scene, for me, defines the film. A group of young women are marched by soldiers through woodland to a heavily-fortified base. They are there for a job interview. Traudl Junge just happens to get the job. It could have been any of the others. Thus the film-makers neatly avoid the pitfall of giving every scene, every line the portentous relevance that only hindsight can bestow. Yes, they seem to be saying, much of this movie owes to Frau Junge’s testament, but her presence at such history-defining events was pure chance. She went for a job interview; simple as that.