|
Wim Wenders on modern life, paraphrasing Groucho: "A child could understand it! Now find me a child, I can't make heads or tails of it." The camera tilts down from cloudy skies to find the German journalist (Rüdiger Vogler) under the boardwalk, paralyzed by angst and with only "empty pictures" to show for his trip across America. The open vistas have become pockmarked with blocky signs ("SODA," "TEXACO," "GAS"), "no one image leaves you in peace, they all want something from you." (Young Mr. Lincoln plays on the motel TV, a newspaper later pronounces Ford dead.) Intersections in the city "like clearings in the woods," he meets nine-year-old Alice (Yella Rottländer) at one such junction, the airport where her mother (Lisa Kreuzer) asks him to escort them to Amsterdam. Soon enough the doleful voyager finds himself stuck with the deadpan sprite as they trek through the Netherlands of suspended monorails and "house-graves." Antonioni's Il Grido is the model, though perhaps this should be seen more as Wenders' own head-clearing travelogue after The Scarlet Letter, with the existential weight of notebooks and snapshots yielding to the spaciousness of the road. His New York is not a modernist void but a collection of fresh perspectives: The Shea Stadium from an organist's vantage point, the Empire State Building in the back of a Harry Callahan composition, the World Trade Center towers glimpsed from a moving cab. One generation's disenchantment is grudgingly buoyed by another's hopes, or at least by the magical sight of Chuck Berry live on stage. "Talking to yourself... More like listening than talking." The closing view of the train indicates Ray's Pather Panchali, a literally uplifting vision. With Edda Köchl, Ernest Boehm, and Hans Hirschmüller. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |