The Sky Above Berlin

I mentioned back at the beginning of October when TCM brought back the Two for One mini-series that I had recorded several movies that various of the co-hosts selected. Tonight (Nov. 30), the presenter is David Byrne from the group Talking Heads. His first choice is Michael Powell's A Matter of Life and Death at 8:00, which I first blogged about ages ago. That's followed at 10:00 PM by a second film that mixes both black-and-white and color as well as having supernatural themes: Wings of Desire.

The setting is contemporary (at least for when the movie was released in 1987) West Berlin, at a time when Germany was still divided and tshere was still that pesky wall around the western sector of Berlin. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are a couple of trenchcoat-wearing angels who can only see the world in black and white and who try to comfort people who live very lonely lives in spite of the fact that West Berlin is a big and crowded city. However, people can't actually see or hear the angels and the angels don't have much power to change humans' actions. The angels have been around since before the beginning of history, and among the places they spend a lot of time is at the main public library, where one of the men is a very elderly man, Homer (Curt Bois, who had fled Nazi Germany in real life and had a small role in Casablanca; here he's in his mid-80s).

Another notable person touched by the angels is actor Peter Falk (playing himself). Falk is in West Berlin to shoot a movie about Germany just after the fall of the Nazis, although the plot of the movie-within-a-movie is unimportant for the story of Wings of Desire. Falk has taken up sketch artistry, but more important is that he seems to be one of the very few people who has a sense that there's some sort of presence around him.

The one other notable figure with whom the angels get involved is Marion (Solveig Dommartin). She's a trapeze artist from France working for a traveling circus, and realizes that the circus is about fold and leave her once again without a job. She retires to her trailer, where it's through her eyes that we first see the world in color, although here it's looking like the sort of more pastel colors from 1950s or 1960s photography.

Damiel sees Marion, and this time, he's the one who's touched, or at least as touched as an angel can be when such an angel has been around for millennia and is unable to feel human emotions. Damiel, however, decides that if he could, he'd like to give it all up to become a mere mortal human so that he can be with Marion. And wouldn't you know it, but Damiel wakes up one mornign near the Berlin Wall with the world around him in color, although he can't recognize colors. He's human now, but he also discovers that in the preceding night the circus has closed shop and Marion is no longer with them. Will Damiel find Marion?

There's not much of a plot to Wings of Desire. Or, there is a plot, at least involving Damiel wanting to become human to be with Marion. However, that plot doesn't really come in until the latter third of the movie. Before that, there's a lot of exposition, and the first two-thirds of the movie movie really slowly. That may be a problem for some viewers, especially native speakers of English, since most of the movie is in German while Marion's inner thoughts are revealed in her native French. There's a reason why it's not an uncommon view that Wings of Desire is somewhat pretentious.

However, the cinematography in Wings of Desire -- both the monochrome and color -- is gorgeous, highlighting some very photogenic parts of West Berlin as well as making suitably slummy those parts that didn't get as much chance to recover from the war for whatever reason (eg. their proximity to the eventual wall. The acting is good as well, and all of this combines to make the sort of movie you can see why some people regard it so highly.