Waiting for Wim Wenders' future to come clean

New York Times
July 31st 2000

by Elvis Mitchell

In his short documentary “Chambre 666,” the German director Wim Wenders posed a single question to fellow directors during the 1982 Cannes International Film Festival, asking each of them about the future of cinema. It’s a lively, brittle and memorable piece of work – filmmakers pop in and out of a hotel room, sit in front of a camera and reveal their feelings on life and filmmaking – a work that now provokes a question itself. What is the future of Wimp Wanders? He has one of the most peculiar careers in film, and by all rights, he should have had a much bigger one.

When his name comes up in conversation, the buzz over his puzzling lack of success and the anticipation of his next movie can bring people from all corners of a party to voice....

....their affection. I’ve seen it happen, and in those conversations, people get embarrassed, as if they take his misses personally, and somehow feel as if they know him.

The schisms between his documentaries – “Buena Vista Social Club,” with its elegant airiness; the incredible “Chambre 666,” and “Notebook on Cities and Clothes”(1989), in which he compares sensibilities with the designer Yohij Yamamoto – and his feature films may offer some explanation. With “Buena Vista,” his 1998 documentary on the aging Cuban musicians retired by a shortsighted government that had rendered them obsolete, he created a movie that radiated a sense of pleasure, a picture that made him seem a voluptuary who shared the vibe with an audience. But Mr. Wenders has been plagued by fits and starts over the last decade, and this lack of consistency has resulted in his last few movies’ getting spotty releases at best.

That may be because there aren’t many other filmmakers whose efforts are so filled with decency and a need to understand what makes his characters so screwy, why they don’t fit in” there’s never any risk that Mr. Wenders will humiliate a character in one of his movies. There’s a single image that haunts all of his films – you’ll see a single figure, alone and lonely, standing in an oversized topcoat, shouldering all the misery of the world.

His essential generosity and compassion are exemplified for many filmgoers by Peter Falk and Bruno Ganz in the 1987 displaced-angels story “Wings of Desire” (which was coated with powdered sugar and remade 10 years later as “City of Angels” with Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan). These qualities often figure in stories of people who have their noses against the glass, pressing so hard that they leave big smudges. For those who’ve seen more of his movies, Rudiger Vogler, the sound recordist in the luscious and meandering “Lisbon Story,” and Patrick Bauchau, who has played the inquisitive filmmaker Monroe on a number of occasions for Mr. Wenders, are those representations of humanity.

Mr. Wenders has a startling talent for allowing his characters to wear their hearts on their sleeves, and them measuring the degree of the hang in centimeters. The movies can be shiny and brooding simultaneously. The titles themselves spell out restive yearning – “Wings of Desire,” “Faraway, So Close,” “Until the End of the World,” “Notebook on Cities and Clothes,” “Paris, Texas,” “Kings of the Road,” “Alice in the Cities” – and a search for a home outside of where the protagonists are staying. Has any other filmmaker brought to his work the compulsion to get away – to flee from somewhere? His characters seem to rest wherever they fall, and war out more shoe leather than Harrison Ford in “The Fugitive,” on the run from an unhappiness dogging them so thoroughly they’d have to be flayed to shed it.

In his fictional films, his characters wander mournfully through a world in which they don’t belong, and manage to turn even heaven into a melancholy dystopia. His most recent film, “Million Dollar Hotel,” which played out of competition at Cannes, is full of such unfulfilled people – mental patients and the homeless. The film is creeping around the world at festivals, looking for a way, it seems, to slip into the United States unnoticed, Produced by Mel Gibson’s company, Icon, and featuring Mr. Gibson in a supporting role, “Hotel” may be the only film to feature Mel Gibson in the last 20 years that has gone unreleased in the actor’s biggest market, America. It also stars Milla Jovovich and Jeremy Davies, and has a score composed by Bono, yet it’s likely that the movie – a more-or-less suspense story set in a crummy Los Angeles hotel, and more specifically another examination of the lower class to which Mr., Wenders is so attracted – will never see a commercial release here.---In his documentaries, as opposed to his feature films, he’s drawn to people who are completely at home in their skins, perhaps because he tends to be attracted to artists. In “Chambre 666” and “Buena Vista Social Club,” these filmmakers and musicians know who they are and have an intuitive comfort with their skills and their places in the world. In “Buena Vista,” the performers are natural stars biding their time for the spotlight to find them again – and seem fully assured that it will.

The best way to track Mr. Wenders’s career is to sift through the soundtrack section of music stores. Mr. Wenders shows none of the foggy anxiety -- a depressing compulsion towards philosophizing that often derails his narratives – in putting together the scores for his films. The “Lisbon Story” score, performed by the Portuguese group Madredeus, has a joyous and harmonious lilt; the band appears in the movie and is an integral part of the plot. The rapturous music lifts the film off the ground, and the same could be said for the meticulous good taste that makes up all of Mr. Wenders’s song scores. He handpicks most of the music himself, and his interest in music is so keen that he should be running a record label or a radio station. I’ve heard tales from record store employees in New York and Los Angeles of Mr. Wenders’s poking through their places of employment and dropping a pile of money on CD’s and vinyl. And when he returns, it’s clear that he’s really listened to what he’d previously bought. In the documentaries and in his exquisite music selections, Mr. Wenders finds a clarity he can’t always bring to his fiction films. I’m not ready to give up on him just yet.

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