The main characters in the film are two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), who have existed for eternity and spend their days silently and invisibly watching over the people of Berlin (the literal translation of the film’s German title is The Skies Over Berlin, which underscores how the film is very much about the city itself, still divided by the Wall). Although we initially see Damiel perched at the top of a building with traditional angel wings that slowly dissolve away, Wenders wisely steers clear of traditional angelic imagery, instead garbing his middle-aged angels in long, dark overcoats, which grounds their otherworldliness in the literal and the everyday (they are spiritual workmen).

Along with other unnamed angels, Damiel and Cassiel move about the bustling city, occasionally laying their unseen hands on people who are suffering emotionally or physically, which passes on a faint sense of calm and reassurance. It’s a beautiful sentiment, the idea of angels among us hearing our inner voices and touching our lives, and Wenders delicately unfolds the scenario, allowing us to absorb the images and the ideas without any need to rush into a narrative.

Not that Wings of Desire is lacking a story. On a narrative level, the film is about Damiel’s decision to become part of the human world because, after so many eons of observing human behavior and interactions and experiences, he longs to leave the spiritual realm and join them. Part of this is motivated by his falling in love with a lonely trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin), whom he first sees practicing her act in a small, traveling circus that is on the verge of closing. Damiel is captivated by her beauty, but moreso by her loneliness and desire to be loved; it is something that he cannot heal as an angel, but can perhaps heal as a man. He is encouraged in his endeavors by an American actor (Peter Falk, essentially playing himself) who is in Berlin for a movie shoot (some kind of thriller about the Holocaust). Falk senses the presence of the angels around him and explains to them the joys of human existence, particularly the small things like the feeling of rubbing your hands together to generate warmth when they’re cold. It is telling that Damiel’s realization that he is fully human comes with his bleeding, which subtly suggests that all of the pleasures of being human are also fraught with the possibilities of pain and hurt--a wonderful, horrible paradox that is given historical weight by regular flashbacks to footage of Berlin during and after World War II, much of it reduced to rubble and death and grief.

Shot by legendary French cinematographer Henri Alekan, Wings of Desire is nothing if not a breathtakingly beautiful film. Wenders chose to delineate the world of angels and the world of humanity with color, shooting everything from the angels’ experience in black and white and then shifting to color once Damiel “falls.” It is an intriguing visual choice, as it suggests that, despite their omnipotent power, the angels are denied the sensual elements of human existence, which is rendered via the color spectrum. This also presents an intriguing and clever reversal of the black-and-white/color dichotomy in The Wizard of Oz (1939), which replaced the gray tones of Kansas with the lurid Technicolor of the fantasy realm of Oz. In Wings of Desire, the fantasy is humanity, which forces us to see ourselves with new eyes--a truly profound achievement.

Copyright ©2009 James Kendrick

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