Wings of Desire, a.k.a. Der Himmel über Berlin (Heaven Over Berlin) (Road Movies Filmproduktion [Berlin], Argos Films [Paris], Westdeutscher Rundfunk [WDR], Wim Wenders Stiftung, Orion, MGM, 1987)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Monday, September 25) at about 9:50 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched Wings of Desire, a.k.a. Der Himmel über Berlin (“Heaven Over Berlin”), a 1987 art-house film produced and directed by Wim Wenders from a script he co-wrote with noted German author Peter Handke. (Wenders and Handke had previously collaborated on a 1975 “road movie” called The Wrong Move.) Two other writers are listed on the film’s imdb.com page: Richard Reitinger, who isn’t listed at the beginning but is credited at the end; and Bernard Eisenschitz, who isn’t credited at all. Charles had recommended Wings of Desire to me partly after we’d just seen Barbie and he saw a parallel between the two movies in that both involve protagonists who leave a mythical realm to interact with the real world. I don’t see that at all. Wings of Desire is a magical-realist fantasy about an angel named Damiel (Bruno Ganz) who’s stalking out Berlin with another angel, Cassiel (Otto Sander). The two are dressed in black and don’t sport wings – though Damiel’s very first scene in the movie shows him wearing wings which almost immediately disappear – and they drive around the divided city (remember this film was made two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Wall figures prominently in the film’s plot) in a black BMW convertible. They have the telepathic power to listen to the conversations and innermost thoughts of the normal human beings who surround them, many of which are of a stupefying banality. We get reams of this stuff in German with English subtitles (Charles was worried we’d have to tweak the DVD settings to get the subtitles, but they popped up automatically).

Supposedly Damiel and Cassiel are there not only to eavesdrop on humans but to comfort and console them, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of them succeeding at this, at least in part because, though the angels move about freely in the human realm, they’re invisible and inaudible to ordinary people. In one of the film’s most intense scenes Damiel tries to reach out to a young man (Sigurd Rachman) who’s about to commit suicide by jumping off a tall building, and though Damiel stands behind the man and literally reaches out to him, the man feels nothing and goes through with his suicide. (I love the German term for suicide: Selbstmord, literally “self-murder.” In the credits, Rachman’s role is listed as “Der Selbstmörder,” “the self-murderer.”) Most of the film is in black-and-white to emphasize the angels’ alienation from the normal human world, though there are flashes of color occasionally through the first three-fourths of the film and the last one-fourth is the opposite: mostly in color, but with a few flashes of black-and-white. The color represents Damiel’s reaching out for contact with normal humanity and the way in which he’s yearning for both physical and emotional connection with people in general, and one person in particular. The person he’s yearning for the most is Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a woman trapeze artist who works for a traveling circus called the “Circus Alekan” (after the film’s cinematographer, Henri Alekan, a veteran cameraman who shot, among other things, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, the 1948 British version of Anna Karenina with Vivien Leigh, and the 1953 Hollywood production Roman Holiday, filmed in Europe with William Wyler directing). Perhaps since Henri Alekan was French, the circus is a bi-national affair with its performers and staff speaking to each other in both German and French (something Charles noticed before I did).

The Circus Alekan is set up on the ruins of the old Potsdamer Platz, frustrating an elderly man who looks for the former location of Potsdamer Platz and can’t find it. It’s also going broke financially and is about to give its last performance (though there are two or three circus shows in the film and it’s unclear which one is supposed to be the last performance), after which Marion is anxious about what she’s going to do with her life and whether she’ll still be able to make a living. There are at least two scenes in which she reluctantly considers going back to being a waitress, which is what she did before she joined the circus. There’s also one rather creepy scene in which Damiel is inside the circus trailer in which Marion lives; he watches her put on a record by Nick Cave and his band, the Bad Seeds (later Nick Cave appears as himself in the film in a nightclub scene in which he performs two songs, “The Carny” and “From Her to Eternity”). He pats her on the back at one point, only because he’s intangible to her she doesn’t respond to him at all, let alone in the predictable way in which you’d expect a woman to panic when she realized a strange man was with her in her bedroom. And there’s a running subplot which features Peter Falk (as himself), who’s in Berlin to make a film set in 1945 in which he plays an American detective (what else?) investigating a rumor that in the last days of the Third Reich Joseph Goebbels hired an actor to impersonate Hitler, and either the actor rather than the real Hitler committed suicide (or it was faked to look like he had) and the real Hitler is still alive, or the actor took on the role and so there’s a faux “Hitler” out there somewhere. There’s an ironic comment on fame in which a bunch of German teenage boys spot Falk on the Berlin streets and one of them goes, “Is that Columbo?” The other three decide he isn’t.

In fact, Wings of Desire is full of ironic comments and individual scenes that are quite moving, but they’re tied to a plot that makes almost no sense. The final one-quarter of the film, which is mostly (but not entirely) in color, consists of Damiel somehow overcoming his angelhood and finding at least brief love in Marion’s arms – though the two do no more than kiss and I’m grateful to Wenders and Handke for not showing Damiel and Marion having graphic, explicit sex (or the fakes that pass for it in mainstream films). In fact, Wings of Desire is so decorous one could almost imagine it being made under the 1930’s to 1960’s Hollywood Production Code – though there was a very similar story actually made during Code-era Hollywood, I Married an Angel (1942), the eighth and last joint appearance of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. It was based on a plot Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had suggested to MGM studio head Irving Thalberg in 1933 as the first MacDonald-Eddy movie, but even in that supposedly “pre-Code” era the censors nixed it. Rodgers and Hart went on to do it as a stage musical in 1938, but for the film that finally got made the writers had to fudge the plot premise and make it all, if not a dream, then certainly a fantasy of Eddy’s character.

This morning I asked Charles what about Barbie had reminded him of Wings of Desire, and he said the whole idea of a being traveling from a fantasy realm to the real world – but that’s a quite common story trope in all sorts of fiction, as is the idea of a god-like figure coming to Earth and making love to an ordinary human. Countless tales from Greco-Roman, Norse, (East) Indian and Native American mythology depict gods coming down from Olympus, Valhalla or wherever they live to have sex with humans and produce super-powered offspring. That’s also, of course, the founding myth of Christianity, though Christians are asked to believe that it only happened once. Wings of Desire is the sort of film I want to like, and there were parts of it I found genuinely moving while other parts made me laugh out loud, but it’s also a film frustrated by its own intellectual pretensions – though I liked Henri Alekan’s hard-edged (mostly) black-and-white cinematography, the common look of foreign films in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Alekan was born on February 10, 1909 in Paris, which made him 36 years older than his director (Wim Wenders was born August 15, 1945, just 3 ½ months after Adolf Hitler’s death and the end of the European theatre in World War II), and this movie was so beautifully photographed that I had the weird feeling of nostalgia for the Berlin Wall.