Wim Wenders' film was released 30 years ago - Corriere.it

Wim Wenders' film was released 30 years ago - Corriere.it


Of Philip Mazzarella

a new turning point for the German director after the cyclopean failure of Until the end of the world

On May 18, 1993 Wim Wenders presented in competition at the Cannes Film Festival (he won the grand jury prize), "Far away, so close / In weiter Ferne, so nah!", sequel to the famous "The sky above Berlin / Der Himmel ber Berlin ” (which in 1987, also in Cannes, had earned him the award for best director). The film was then released in Italian theaters at Christmas of that year, without repeating the feat of the prototype and received with mixed reviews (when not acidic or even derisive) both by critics and by the (small) public. a new turning point for the German director, after the cyclopean failure of "Until the end of the world / Bis ans Ende der Welt" (1991) and perhaps marks the culmination of an inexplicable withdrawal that will mark the entire decade of his confusion "major" production ("Crimini invisibili / The End of Violence", 1993, and "The Million Dollar Hotel", 2000), illuminated however by an alternation of smaller films ("Lisbon Story", 1994; "I brothers Skladanowsky/Die gebrder Skladanowsky, 1995, and above all the unforgettable “Buena Vista Social Club”, 1999) decidedly more focused.

In “Far Far, So Close!”, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the changes German reunification has wrought, angel-turned-human Damiel (Bruno Ganz) starts a family, while his sidekick Cassiel (Otto Sander) watches still on men with the celestial Raphaela (Nastassja Kinski) although he too is developing the desire to abandon his role as guardian in order to better understand from within the message of love and spirituality of which the angels are bearers. After saving the life of a little girl, Raissa (Aline Krajewski), Cassiel realizes that he instinctively chose to take the same step as Damiel and finds himself dealing as a human with the suffering inherent in mortal condition. However, he is hindered by the mysterious figure of Emit Flesti (Willem Dafoe; the two-faced name of the character Time Itself, i.e. Time Itself) who, contrary to his earthly existence and with repeated cheating, causes him to fall into alcoholism so that the duration of his life is shortened. . And, meanwhile, his paths cross with those of several characters: his friend Damiel and the family he created with the trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), the former angel Peter Falk (himself), the old driver of a Nazi hierarch, Konrad (Heinz Rhmann), the little girl who saved and her mother Hanna (Monika Hansen), private investigator Philip Winter (Rudiger Vogler) and his guardian angel (Yella Rottlnder), the gangster on the road to repentance and with many enemies Tony Baker (Horst Buchholz) who traffics in weapons and pornography, and even rock star Lou Reed and the enlightened former general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev (both playing S themselves). It will be precisely in the confrontation with Baker's enemies, responsible for the kidnapping of his friends who naively ended up in his plots, that Cassiel will lose his life returning to his primitive nature. But from that moment he will be a "new" angel, improved by the awareness that human beings, enclosed in many small monads, leave little room for solidarity and piety; and with Raphaela I will continue more motivated than ever to help them look at things through her angelic sensitivity.

Six years after "Heaven over Berlin" and after the epochal event of the fall of the Wall, Wenders decided to return to the characters he created with Peter Handke (who did not want to collaborate in drafting the new screenplay -not a good sign-, replaced by Richard Reitinger and the pedantic dialogue writer Ulrich Ziegler). But also the contemporary Wenders was radically different from that of the previous decade: he went through the "impossible" and Sisyphean experience of the extremely troubled and bankruptcy showdown "Until the end of the world", increasingly mysteriously attracted by "impossible" projects and boundless, for the discussed continuation up to replacing the magical/metaphysical fairytale dimension and the effective poetic/narrative suspensions of the prototype with a sort of incessant pontification, a rhetoric (of images, strangely, even before the contents), an immeasurable expansion of puny narrative traces, an unforgivable waste of cast and positions. Reiterating with seriousness this time you learn that mixture of genres (comedy, drama, noir, documentary, fantastic) that the original concocted with a delicacy absent here, alongside a surprising and too cerebral reflection with pretensions of universality (and we don't know how much sincere) on the fate of all humanity. The result, spoiled by his "new" nature as an intellectually pleased narrator and without any ability to synthesise, baffled most. "Wenders wants to talk about everything: about life and love, about peace in the world and about the perversions of the civilization of the image" (P. Mereghetti), but not only: he cites himself by recomposing for a moment the couple Vogler/Yellnder of " Alice in the cities / Alice in den Stdten” of exactly twenty years earlier, settles in twisted references to Nazism (complete with a graphic reworking of Munch's The Scream), indulges in a form of anthropological reflection so programmatically naive as to be fake , to an unexpectedly (or perhaps not) ecumenical "message", to a fortunately barely hinted reduction/simplification of Leibniz's thought. All in the name of those characteristics that his primitive cinema possessed (the notations on the crisis of existential models that determined the crumbling of the ego and the loss of identity, the reflections on the discomfort of living in the era of the end of ideological utopias and precariousness of existence that found their most masterful fulfillment in a masterpiece such as "Del corso del tempo / Im Lauf der Zeit", 1976 or, better, in "The state of things / Der Stand der Dinge", 1982) and which here seem lost and replaced again by simplified and involuntarily grotesque glosses (like the force-grafting of Gorbachev's stream of consciousness). Compared to "The sky above Berlin", which has withstood and continues to bear the weight of Time (Same), "Cos far, so close" is a film that remains, today as then, substantially invaluable even from the point of view of a pompous presentation images (and music: the sumptuous soundtrack sees the famous “Stay (Faraway, So Close!)” by U2 as the spearhead as well as songs by Lou Reed, Johnny Cash and the old acquaintance of the director Nick Cave, with the final “ Cassiel's Song”) unless you profess an absolute Wendersian act of faith. Even if hindsight imposes a kind of yearning nostalgia for a time (and a cinema) in which even failing (so) big could be considered a perverse form of triumph.

May 18, 2023 (change May 18, 2023 | 10:16 am)



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