| Wings of Desire | |
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US theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Wim Wenders |
| Produced by | Wim Wenders Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Wim Wenders Peter Handke |
| Screenplay by | Richard Reitinger |
| Starring | Bruno Ganz Solveig Dommartin Otto Sander Curt Bois Peter Falk |
| Music by | Jürgen Knieper |
| Cinematography | Henri Alekan |
| Editing by | Peter Przygodda |
| Studio | Road Movies Filmproduktion Westdeutscher Rundfunk |
| Distributed by | Basis-Film-Verleih GmbH (West Germany) Argos Films (France) Orion Classics (US) |
| Release date(s) | September 23, 1987 (France) October 27, 1987 (West Germany) May 6, 1988 (United States) |
| Running time | 127 minutes |
| Country | West Germany France |
| Language | German English French Turkish Hebrew Spanish |
| Budget | €2.5 million[1] |
| Box office | USD$3,210,139[2] |
Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin, translated literally as The Sky Over Berlin) is a 1987 Franco-German romantic fantasy film directed by Wim Wenders. The film is about invisible, immortal angels who populate Berlin and listen to the thoughts of the human inhabitants and comfort those who are in distress. Even though the city is densely populated, many of the people are isolated and estranged from their loved ones. One of the angels, played by Bruno Ganz, falls in love with a beautiful, lonely trapeze artist. The angel chooses to become human so that he can experience the human sensory pleasures, ranging from enjoying food to touching a loved one, and so that have a chance at human love with the trapeze artist. The film is shot in both a rich, sepia-toned black-and-white and colour, with the former being used to represent the world as experienced by the angels.
The film was followed by a sequel, Faraway, So Close!, in 1993, and in 1998, an American remake called City of Angels was released.
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Set in contemporary West Berlin (at the time still surrounded by the Berlin Wall), Wings of Desire follows two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by the people, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of Berliners: a pregnant woman in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, a painter struggling to find inspiration, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their raison d'être is, as Cassiel says, to "assemble, testify, preserve" reality. In addition to the story of two angels, the film also is a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Damiel and Cassiel have always existed as angels; they existed in Berlin before it was a city, and before there were even any humans.
Among the Berliners they encounter in their wanderings is an old man named Homer, who, unlike the Greek poet of war Homer, dreams of an "epic of peace." Cassiel follows the old man as he looks for the then-demolished Potsdamer Platz in an open field, and finds only graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. Although Damiel and Cassiel are pure observers, visible only to children, and incapable of any physical interaction with our world, Damiel begins to fall in love with a profoundly lonely circus trapeze artist named Marion. She lives by herself in a caravan, dances alone to the music of Crime and the City Solution, and drifts through the city.
A subplot follows Peter Falk, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin's Nazi past. As the film progresses, it emerges that Peter Falk was once an angel, who, having grown tired of always observing and never experiencing, renounced his immortality to become a participant in the world.
Eventually, Damiel too longs for physicality, and to become human. When he sheds his immortal existence, he experiences life for the first time: he bleeds, sees colors for the first time (the movie up to this point is filmed in a sepia-toned monochrome, except for brief moments when the angels are not present or looking), tastes food and drinks coffee. Meanwhile, Cassiel inadvertently taps into the mind of a young man just about to commit suicide by jumping off a building; Cassiel tries to save the young man but is unable to do so, and is left haunted and tormented by the experience. Eventually, Damiel meets the trapeze artist Marion at a bar (during a concert by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and they greet each other with familiarity as if they had long known each other. In the end, Damiel is united with the woman he had desired for so long. The film ends with the message: "To be continued."
The story is concluded in Wenders' 1993 sequel, In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close!).
Wings of Desire received "Two Thumbs Up" from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert on Siskel & Ebert & The Movies.[3] Leslie James of 680 News Toronto claims it is one of the best movies of all time. It was ranked #64 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema" in 2010.[4] The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes records that 98% of its cited critics gave the film a positive review.[5]
The film won the award for Best Director at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.[6]
Rainer Maria Rilke's poetry partially inspired the movie; Wenders claimed angels seemed to dwell in Rilke's poetry. The director also employed Peter Handke, who wrote much of the dialogue, the poetic narrations, and the film's recurring poem "Song of Childhood."
The movie was made with a minimal script; it is a mood piece exploring people, the city, and a concept: a longing for and love of life, existence, reality. Peter Falk wasn't meant to be a sketch artist until Wenders discovered Falk's talent. Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander were cast because they were old friends, who had known each other for decades. Solveig Dommartin was Wenders' actress girlfriend; although the circus part required extensive and risky acrobatics, she was able to learn the trapeze and rope moves in only eight weeks, and did all the work herself, without a net.
The film was shot by the 77 year-old cinematographer Henri Alekan, who had worked on Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête). It represents the angels' point of view in monochrome and switches to color to show the human point of view. During filming Alekan used a very old and fragile silk stocking that had belonged to his grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.
The shift from monochrome to color, to distinguish the angels' reality from the mortals', was first used in A Matter of Life and Death by Powell and Pressburger in 1946.
As revealed in the DVD, Wings of Desire could have turned out to be a far less serious film. Cut scenes from the beginning of the film had Cassiel humorously mimicking the humans' actions. Other cut scenes were experiments of how to show the angel's invisibility/lack of physical form using double exposure. There was also a female angel who was cut from the movie, appearing only during a pan-shot in the library scene. The end was much different from the final cut—it was originally to have Cassiel turn human as well, and finding Damiel and Marion at the bar where they engage in a pie fight.
In 1998, an American remake called City of Angels was released. The setting was Los Angeles and starred Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage. Aside from the basic premise of angels watching humans, with the opening scene also taking place in a landmark library, and a love story, the 1998 film bears little relation to the original.
Malayalam movie "Njan Gandharvan" (1990), the last movie of famous director Padmarajan has a very similar thread in an Indian mythological setting and is probably inspired from this movie.The movie depcits the tragic lovestory of a Gandharva who falls in love with an earthling, and desires to shed his divinity to become a mere mortal, for the sake of love.
The first theatre adaptation of Wings of Desire was created by the Northern Stage theatre company in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK in 2003. This particular adaptation (which entailed film footage of the city and stories from the community) was adapted and directed by Alan Lyddiard who then re-created it at Betty Nansen Theatre in Copenhagen in 2005.
In 2006, the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Toneelgroep Amsterdam presented another stage adaptation of the movie, created by Gideon Lester and Dirkje Houtman and directed by Ola Mafaalani.
In the closing titles it says: "Dedicated to all the former angels, but especially to Yasujiro, François and Andrej." This is in reference to fellow filmmakers Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky.
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