The cities around Alice

Continuing my futile quest to free up space on my DVR, I decided to watch Alice in the Cities to do a post on it here.

Rüdifer Vogler plays Philip, a German journalist who is doing a feature story on America and as part of that story driving through the country, seeing the parts that tourists don't see. He seems bored by it all, not doing much writing but taking a whole bunch of Polaroid shots. (Did anybody ever get Polaroids to come out looking this good?) Philip gets to New York with a whole bunch of photos but no story, pissing his boss off to no end. Philip wants to go back to Germany to write the actual story.

Unfortunately, Philip is going to have to take a detour to get back to Germany, since the air traffic controllers are on strike, effectively closing off German airspace. He'll have to fly to someplace like Amsterdam and get to Germany from there. At the airport, he meets Lisa (Elisabeth Kreuzer), a woman who's obviously got a complicated life with a huge back story that's never fully revealed. She's got a daughter Alice (Yella Rotländer) and no husband, instead having lived in various places with various men, and deciding she needs to get out of her current situation in New York.

Philip helps them get their tickets since their English is very limited, and in exchange Lisa eventually lets Philip spend the night in their hotel room since he's quite short on money. Philip takes Alice to the Empire State Building, while Lisa goes presumably to break off the relationship with her current partner. But the result is that Lisa doesn't show up for the flight, saying instead that she'll meet up with Philip and Alice a day later in Amsterdam.

Philip and Alice have a day to spend in Amsterdam, and on the next day, he waits for the incoming passengers... and Lisa is not among them. What to do with Alice? She supposedly remembers having grandparents somewhere in Germany, but she's not quite certain which city, or what her grandparents' surname is, these being Mom's parents. The two set off for Germany to find the grandparents.

Eventually Philip gets the right idea and takes Alice to a police station to let them handle things, but Alice decides to run away and join up with Philip again in her quest for her grandparents. Frankly, at this point I would have taken her right back to the police, but Philip decides he'd rather help Alice and ignore the fact that the police might get the wrong idea and arrest him.

To be honest, Alice in the Cities was not my kind of movie. It's talky, slow, and frankly, I found myself not liking any of the characters, which is a big problem when there are only two main characters. There's some interesting cinematography, such as places in the US that probably aren't there any more, and also the Wuppertal monorail. But that was about it for me. Other people praise the movie, however, for whatever message they perceive it as trying to put across.

Alice in the Cities is available on DVD as part of a Criterion box set of movies from its director, Wim Wenders. That means it's pricey and not something I'd drop money on. But as always, judge for yourself, especially if you can do the streaming thing and it should show up on the Criterion Channel.