Wings of Desire

"When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one"

Title: Wings of Desire
Year of Release: 1987
Director: Wim Wenders
Genre: Drama/Romance
Rating: 9/10

Damiel is an angel, who spends every day helping and watching humans live their life. He becomes increasingly interested in a trapeze artist, and begins imagining what life would be, imagining the simple pleasures of something as simple as drinking a cup of coffee.

Throughout the entire film, there is little talking, and what I mean by that, I mean person-to-person talking. I'd say 80% of the talking in this film is narration. Because instead of hearing someone talk, a lot of the time, you were hear someones thoughts, seeing as Damiel & Cassiel are both angels. It's very effective I think, there isn't any point in the film where you actually think the thoughts should of been substituted with actual spoken person-to-person talk. A lot of the narration throughout this film is poetic, and seems (at least to me) very confusing, a lot of metaphorical references, terms, or whatever. This style of speech, particularly in one of the last scenes really helps increase the re-watchability (new word), I think. Though I've only seen this once, I know this film is a film you can watch twenty times and still be uncovering certain things, but it's not one where you'll be confused on how certain things happen, or the plot, I'm merely talking about the narration in some parts which add to the quality of this film.

This film mixes a sepia/monochrome look with occasional colour parts. The sepia parts are the way the angels see the world, it's to distinguish the difference, and it is greatly used in a lot of scenes, one in particular that when it goes into colour it's very effective. The sepia look in some scenes really looks good, especially when you see Damiel looking down on some humans near the beginning. The cinematography in this film is really some of the best I have seen in film, quite possibly even the best. There are some point of view shots of the angels which look really good, though you don't see the angels at any point flying above the humans, there is at least one time you see a point of view shot of one flying, can't remember who, exactly. The cinematography is so smooth, I remember one part that, for no particular reason just looked very good to me, and it's where the camera goes over the Berlin wall into the "forbidden zone" (or whatever it was called). I'm sure that every single human being with a pair of eyes can appreciate this films cinematography, it's just so damn good!

There are a lot of scenes where Angel-Human interaction is shown, well, not so much interaction, but how the angels help humans, with a simple touch. It makes for some really good scenes, especially the opening one, where you see a lot of the humans thoughts and whatnot. There is one particular scene involving a suicidal male, who is around his twenties. This scene was very good, but I can't really explain why, just the actual visual appearance of the scene, and effective power that radiates from the scene is really strong. This isn't important or anything, but if you do watch this film, in the opening there is a guy sitting on his bed, is it just me or does he look a lot like James Dean? You don't have to answer that, it's just an unimportant observation.

All in all, a very good film from Wim Wenders, I've only seen this and Paris, Texas, and he has impressed me a lot with the two. This one is very strong and much more appealing, because the style of it is so distinctive I thought, I just really enjoyed this film, I surely wouldn't love it as much if it didn't look the way it looks. I don't really know who to recommend this to, if you admire cinematography? check this out? Possibly fans of the film Stalker may like this, though I really didn't like Stalker, that's one that springs to mind. Oh! If you've seen the remake, City of Angels, spit that one out and stomp on it for a couple minutes, then watch this! As I've said, it's very good.