I Would Like to See It: Wings of Desire

Few movies have the balls to flatly state that actor Peter Falk descended from on high to live a mortal life, trading in his wings and holy armor for a rumpled raincoat. Wings of Desire is one such film. Its balance between solemnity and easy, natural humor transforms what might in hands less skilled than Wenders’ have been an exercise in trite slice of life vignettes into a profound meditation on the minutiae which constitute human existence, the fleeting thoughts and contradictions which both unite and separate us. In its angels, bearing silent witness to the unspoken inner lives of all mankind, it refines and depicts this paradoxically intimate sense of isolation, a window into a world where the barriers of personhood may be breached, but only by those who stand outside of time, beyond sensual experience, not living but existing, not feeling but understanding. To join that cacophony of emotion, the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) must sacrifice his perspective, consigning himself to eternal isolation within the limits of individual personhood to chase the wild joys and crushing depths of mortal life.

Still, there is a sacred, almost votive quality to the mortal Damiel’s rendezvous with the object of his affection, trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin). He offers her a glass of wine as though it were the sacrament, and she accepts with equal gravity. In quiet voices they discuss their loneliness, their need to be known and held. Ganz leans in as though for a kiss, but instead offers his ear, bearing witness as he did before taking physical form. The color which blazed so brilliantly through the film’s until-then black and white palette when he first beheld Marion rehearsing now softens, shadows growing deep and intimate. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds are performing just a wall away as Marion tells Damiel he has to mean it if he wants to be with her, that she needs more than just a feeling, a commitment, a structure in which to exist. Like everything in Wings of Desire, the thing she truly needs is left appropriately nebulous, a fixed point around which her dreams orbit.

The aged poet Homer, played by legendary stage and screen actor Curt Bois, then 87, is another linchpin of the film’s dissection of separation and communion. As he limps through Berlin, wandering the brutalist vaults and stairways of a modern library, making his way slowly across bombed-out stretches of new growth where ruins loom above the tangled grass, he ponders his work and its effect in the world. Has it brought his readers together, or else hopelessly pushed them apart? Can something experienced alone by many individuals provide the means by which they might be united in understanding? Bois’ gaunt, weathered face is at once alive with the fire of artistic passion and gravely, obviously weary. He would die just a few years later. Again, the film attempts no answer to his question. Are we together, or are we apart? Can we know each other, or only desire it with a desperate hunger? It’s one of the few “what is this thing we call life?” movies I’ve seen that didn’t leave me rolling my eyes.

Just before Damiel abandons immortality for life on earth, the film brings World War II from where it lurks in the background of Berlin’s ruined quarters directly into focus. Piled bodies. Infants left dead in the dirt, their angelic faces slack. A woman waves from the third story of a gutted building exposed to the open air, the living room around her untouched until it meets the border of whatever detonation shattered the whole residence. The desire to belong can as easily birth the lockstep fascism of the Nazi war machine as it can the hushed voices of two lovers opening themselves to each other. Even divine aid is not proof against the pain and misery of the world; in one scene, Cassiel (Otto Sander) sits on the edge of a roof beside a young man contemplating suicide. We have seen his silent witness give other men strength, bring them out of hopelessness and back into themselves. Not this time. The man pushes off like a swimmer kicking from the tiles. We hear his clothes flap in the wind, and then nothing. Can we be together? It’s a question which encompasses so much, and yet against the grinding pressure of existing in the world it is, in its own way, completely powerless.