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He's the embodiment of modernist rootlessness, "the cowboy in Hamburg," Dennis Hopper with Stetson and tape recorder. "I make money, and I travel a lot." His opposite number is the humble craftsman (Bruno Ganz) who turns down a handshake at the art auction, motivation enough to kick off the intrigue of forgery and murder. A terminal disease is just the thing to turn a family man into a hired killer, the French gangster (Gérard Blain) has an assignment or two. "A bet on my life, so to speak." Not Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley but Wim Wenders', older and burned out, sprawled on a crimson bedspread—volatile yang to his prey's meek yin, who specializes in frames with nothing inside. A good eye suits the old pirate with devious canvases (Nicholas Ray), "a new one's hard to find." (Guest-filmmakers lurk in corners, Samuel Fuller is at hand with cigar and pistol and Jean Eustache offers the protagonist a band-aid for his bruised head.) Shaggy noir abstractions, a sort of spoof of Melvillian precision with the trenchcoated schlub's cloddish subway stalking, in the aftermath his panicky visage turns up in every surveillance camera. The German hometown viewed from a balcony is one vast construction site dotted with orange Volkswagens, Paris from a hotel room is but a mammoth harbor crane and a miniature Statue of Liberty. Characters sing tunes to themselves, everyone's a foreigner everywhere. "Too much on my mind, nothing I can say..." A wealth of arresting compositions, off-kilter flow, the warm glow of a zoetrope and the cold fluorescence of tunnels and airports. Muffled suspense and doleful slapstick, the Wenders thriller. "I'm afraid this is going to be painful in any language." The edge of the ocean means the end of the road, and a different shade of blue. Cinematography by Robby Müller. With Lisa Kreuzer, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid, Sandy Whitelaw, Lou Castel, David Blue, and Andreas Dedecke.
--- Fernando F. Croce |