Angels On a High: 'Wings of Desire'

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LONG A CULT favorite, Wim Wenders' 1987 film "Wings of Desire" has proved to be a quietly influential depiction of Berlin, inspiring U2's experimental period in the early 1990s, R.E.M.'s video for "Everybody Hurts" and an awful Nicolas Cage movie called "City of Angels."

Despite its notoriety, however, "Wings" has been almost impossible to find on DVD: One barebones edition was released in 2003 and went almost immediately out of print.

So a new version is certainly cause for excitement among fans of the German director, especially if it's from Criterion, the DVD company that lovingly packages art-house fare as film-studies seminars.

Borrowing a concept from poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the film follows a pair of angels as they hover over post-Cold War Berlin, reading the deepest spiritual thoughts of Germans going about their mundane lives.

One of the angels, Damiel (played by Bruno Ganz, who has the kindest face imaginable), longs to be human and falls in love with a dreamy trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin, who performs all her acrobatic stunts herself).

Wenders strikes a precarious balance between somber and whimsical, but the Criterion edition shows how "Wings of Desire" could have turned out incredibly different.

One deleted scene shows another angel (the beatific Otto Sander) imitating humans on the sidewalk as if performing a comedy routine, and another shows an alternate ending that involves a pie fight.

Fortunately, these are only deleted scenes and not part of the finished movie, which Wenders and cinematographer Henri Alekan shoot largely from the angels' point of view, the camera floating around a spacious library and soaring around the statue of Victoria.

The picture has been cleaned up considerably (especially on the Blu-Ray edition), bringing out the stark beauty of Wenders' compositions and the contrast between the austere black and white of the angels' point of view and the bold colors of the human world.

In that sense, Berlin is a spiritually and politically divided city, bisected by an actual and an allegorical wall. But "Wings of Desire" portrays it as both a desolate place and as a blank page on which humans and spirits can rewrite their own stories.

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy Criterion