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The opening feint has video lenses on the apocalypse, wanderers in the wasteland turn out to be science-fiction actors, the "gleam in the eyes" can't be captured when they run out of film. Stalled and stranded crew (cp. Beware of a Holy Whore), "we needed a vacation anyway." Fickle affairs, improvised diversions, curlicues of time-wasting around the Portuguese resort: The actress (Isabelle Weingarten) reading The Searchers, the leading man (Jeffrey Kime) alternating between drinking and screwing, the blocked writer (J. Paul Getty III) waxing suicidal, the nebbish (Geoffrey Carey) doing jittery shtick about growing up buck-toothed and cross-eyed. The director (Patrick Bauchau) fancies himself an outsider and wears a cowboy hat, he's Wim Wenders stuck in the middle of Hammett and trying to clear his head while chasing the treacherous Godot of Hollywood. "A real trap, one big cliché." Voices in recorders and collages of snapshots and images fed into grainy computer monitors, out of such things vagabond mood pieces are made. If Europe is a dilapidated hotel on the edge of the ocean, Los Angeles is an enormous garage where people reference old crime movies to try to keep one step ahead of death. "Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic," growls the old cinematographer (Samuel Fuller) with the crotchety wisdom of a vanishing industry. Fritz Lang's Walk of Fame star, Roger Corman as the go-between, a heartening shout-out to Allan Dwan. Finally, the absconded honcho (Allen Garfield) in the mobile home , with little patience for the cinéaste's definition of cinema as "life going by." The laconic joke on Europudding productions builds to Wenders' vision of his own demise in a burlesque of Vivre sa vie, the camera is dropped on the asphalt most fastidiously. Cinematography by Henri Alekan. With Viva, Rebecca Pauly, Camila Mora-Scheihing, Alexandra Auder, and Artur Semedo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |