This is more like it Wim! (After that dreadful American Friend)
A black and white road movie in which no acting feels like its going on.
I like how reticent and aimlessly lost Philip (the journalist) is. No big demonstrative acts of angst. Quiet underplays of emotional gestures, un-acted feelings, subtle awkwardnesses of expression.
And 9 year old Alice is naturally selfish. She charms me with how 9 years old girlish she is – not in that cloyingly sentimental American way, but as a little German girl, expressively, knowingly, unselfconsciously sweet.
Their relationship is delightful. So much warmth and natural charm of feeling between them. Made me feel like I’d like to be Philip – a surrogate dad – for a bit, and have a 9 year old daughter to make me smile fondly, affectionately – at her odd whimsical willfulness.
He’s a glum fuck at the beginning, alienated and estranged, snapping solitary pics with his polaroid camera, driving aimlessly about (in the U. S) from motel to soul-less motel…
And then he has to drive aimlessly about again (in Germany) from hotel to hotel, but gradually inside his lost soul he has to accommodate Alice, has to make room for her lostness too (as an orphan). He loses his disconnect air of troubled abstraction; she starts to connect him to a warmer way of being. He lightens up. Starts smiling more (and being glum less)
They swim together: “You moron“ she calls to him, “you dirty dog”. “Fish face” he says back, “bed pisser”…. “pukehead… nerve wracking yak yak” (that must be a German insult)….
Neither of them is consciously learning “life lessons” as such (ala Hollywood) or going on some dramatic journey of revelatory self-discovery. There’s nothing so deliberately manipulated. This is naturalistic realism – not contrived “reality” (TV)
They un-lonely one another. Find something to be lost about. In each other.
I flipped the display on the Dvd: at chapter 11 (out of 13) already. It’s gonna end soon. I don’t want it to end (even tho we’ve gone past 1 hour 40 minutes)
I’m thinking: wish I’d seen this film back in 1977 at Birmingham Art Centre when i was 19. It would have had big impact on me then. I was ripe for loneliness then. And in need of a little sister to charm me to distraction.
I watched the interview with Wenders. What a suprise. I’d expected him to be a dry intellectual, a bit too cerebral and cold-fishish. But he was warm and heartfelt, seemed to be almost tearful at times. A gentle sensitive soul.
Just like the soul this film has.
Dir: Wim Wenders, Germany
8.5/10
