ANGELS

“Als ein Kind Kind war …”

Recently, I watched Wings of Desire again. Some of its images I’ve carried with me half my life, but I hadn’t seen it in decades. When I first saw it – in a West End cinema in 1987 – I wasn’t a child, but a young man who hadn’t entirely put away childish things. Back then, the first hour or so was the most wonderful thing I’d seen on screen, as the angels Cassiel (Otto Sander) and Damiel (Bruno Ganz) hovered over West Berlin, compassionate and watchful. Thereafter, I thought the wanderings of the old man, Homer, as he tried to make sense of his own and his country’s past in his quest for an ‘epic of peace’, dragged on. And – while the story demands that Damiel becomes mortal to pursue his love for Marion the trapeze artist – for me, the spell was diminished the moment he fell to earth. But what a beautiful film, all the same.

So what did I make of it this time, months away from an unwelcome and ‘significant’ birthday? When you revisit something you loved way back, there’s always the risk it will no longer enchant you as it once did, leaving only anti-climax and a sense of loss.

But it was even better this time. That first hour or so is still one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen on screen. These angels – with pig-tails and heavy overcoats, visible only to children – don’t shine with the blinding light of an implacable God. They are ‘lived-in’ and all too human as they listen to the troubled thoughts of Berliners on the U-Bahn or in the State Library and give out their unseen, unheard solace. (And who couldn’t use a ‘cosmic hug’ in their darkest moments?) The idea of Peter Falk as an angel who sold his celestial armour for 500$ in New York after falling to earth still makes me smile. The ‘Homer’ scenes are more essay than story but now I had more time for them. Homer goes to Potsdamer Platz, the hub of the Berlin in his youth but now a wasteland destroyed first by war and then the Wall, which cuts across the old tramlines. It was like this the first time I went to the city. But now it’s a hub again, bling, all chrome and plate glass and neon. If nothing else – although it’s so much more – Wings of Desire is a document of a weird city when it was at its weirdest.

Marion (the sadly late Solveig Donmartin) seems more sympathetic and much more beautiful than she did when I was twenty-four. And for anyone who can’t hear the name of Bruno Ganz without visualising Hitler foaming at the mouth in Downfall (or in any of the Hitler-memes on YouTube), this film is the perfect cure.

Wings of Desire is part of the European cinema canon. But Wim Wenders’ sequel, Faraway, So Close! (1993) passed me by – partly because I was distracted by impending and actual fatherhood – and it appears to have passed others by too, or disappointed them. So I watched it for the first time and found it better than I’d been led to believe. There’s a new angel – the sad, beautiful Raphaella (Natassia Kinski) – and a well-dodgy character called Emit Flesti (Willem Dafoe, naturally) who flits effortlessly between the worlds of angels and men before revealing himself, in the last reel, as ‘Time’. Peter Falk is here again, along with cameos by Lou Reed and, oddly, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Since Damiel fell to earth at the end of Wings of Desire, Cassiel has watched over him and seen him marry Marion, have a child and start a pizza restaurant. Angels are not allowed to interfere physically in the world of men, so when Cassiel rescues a child falling from a balcony he too becomes mortal. And for a while he is reunited with Damiel. But whereas Damiel has made a very decent fist of being a man, Cassiel is probably better suited to being an angel …

Once again, we have a permanent record of a city in flux. This time it’s the strange days after reunification, when the Wall has crumbled and the cranes have moved in to start building the Berlin of today. There’s more storyline and more humour in Faraway, So Close!, but somehow it’s messier. And however good or bad, no sequel could ever recapture the magic, the wonder, above all the surprise of that first ‘hour or so’ of Wings of Desire.

After Faraway, So Close! I moved on to City of Angels, the American remake of  Wings of Desire. But I reacted so violently against it I switched off after half an hour. Too on-the-nose for my liking, and whereas the closeness of angels to people is compassionate and beautiful in the Wenders films, here it just seemed creepy. Perhaps if I’d persevered it would have turned out good in its own terms: but it wasn’t doing it for me.

On my first trip to Berlin, in 1989, we flew in at night. As we closed in on the city’s landmarks, and the sinister (as I thought it then) Fernsehturm flickered in the dark, I had the strings and voices and synths of the soundtrack in my head. And though some strange things happened over the next few days – like the Wall falling – I was still disappointed not to see Bruno Ganz standing on the ‘broken tooth’ of the Gedächtniskirche. But waiting to go home, in the departure lounge at Tegel, I saw Otto Sander, lacking pig-tail or wings but nevertheless looking like Cassiel, waiting unobtrusively for his flight to be called. And this was childishly pleasing.

So what has any of this to do with acrophobia? As it says at the end of Wings of Desire: To be continued.