Cerebral vs. sensual from the celestial point of view

Originally published July 1, 1988

Wings of Desire is a heavenly fable about angels who hover above Berlin. Gently monitoring the needs of Berliners and eavesdropping on their thoughts, the angels are invisible to the human eye. Since they are unable to see in color, the winged ones bear witness to mortal behavior in glorious, silvery- and-ebony tones - a kind of exalted black-and-white.

Like most angel movies made by mortals, Wings of Desire is about the unbearable lightness of being a spirit when earthy humanity is so much sexier.

Yet the stunning beauty and serenity of the angels' lofty realm in this Wim Wenders film - the first he has made in his homeland since The American Friend in 1977 - makes you wonder what kind of nut would prefer being earthbound. Wings of Desire must be the dreamiest, most ravishing movie since Beauty and the Beast (Cocteau's 1946 romance, silly, not the TV show), which makes sense, as both movies have in common the wizard/cinematographer Henri Alekan. His lustrous images, many shot from an angel's-eye-view above the city, transfigure the melancholy that is the divided and devastated Berlin.

Angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) are ponytailed and tranquil. You might mistake them for caryatids on a Berlin architectural monument. Since they have wings instead of arms, they can't touch anything, but Damiel finds himself in a typical angel dilemma: He's emotionally touched by Marion (Solveig Dommartin) - a trapeze artist in a hipster circus - and he'd like to touch her back. He'd like to experience firsthand the velvetiness of her flesh instead of intellectually understanding its essence.

If Damiel's plight is the conventional stuff of angel romance, Wenders' film categorically is not. Wings of Desire hypnotizes its audience with seraphic rhythms - Damiel and Cassiel walk, but they seem suspended above ground level - and angel faces beatific in their quietude. Wenders' visual clue to the source of angel calm is the fact that they are headquartered in the Berlin public library. Accordingly, a kind of scholarly hush pervades their angel world.

Bruno Ganz (the bulky hero of The Marquise of O) is an unlikely though utterly delightful angel Damiel, who would have us believe (though Alekan's images contradict him) that the floaty nature of his sphere is hugely overrated by mortals. "It's great to live for the spirit," Damiel complains to Cassiel, "but I get fed up with spiritual existence . . . I'd like to feel some weight. "

In addition to the comely Marion, there is another mortal whose presence persuades Damiel that heavy humanity is preferable to the light life. He is actor Peter Falk - playing himself and speaking English - who addresses the invisible Damiel as "companero," and explains that he himself is a fallen angel.

In his inimitably slangy manner, Falk (who ad-libbed his sequences) is hilariously articulate about the great things about being human. "You can smoke, you can have a coffee," he explains of such sensory pleasures, "and if you do 'em both together, it's fantastic. " His earthy sensuality is a sweet contrast to Ganz's transcendent serenity. Falk's performance is powerful propaganda about the superiority of men to angels.

When a movie is so profoundly beautiful as Wings of Desire, it seems cranky to mention the banality of some of its dialogue. While it sounds poetic in German, the subtitled English either is clunkily translated or just plain clunky. Wenders clearly believes a picture is worth a thousand words, figuratively speaking, but sometimes seems to take it literally. Is it always necessary to provide - especially in this longish movie's last scenes - a thousand words for every frame of film?

Despite its logorrhea, Wings of Desire is a turning point for Wenders who (at last!) has abandoned the theme of spiritual emptiness that enervated The American Friend and Paris, Texas. His new interest in spiritual fullness becomes him. Ditto his movie, which proposes to reconcile the spiritual and physical spheres. Unexpectedly touching about Wings of Desire is its heartfelt belief that angels are like God . . . in that they love humans.