In praise of Wings of Desire, a cel­e­bra­tion of life, love and small things

An angel falls in love with a woman and decides to become human in order to be with her. With only this sketchy premise to go on, you could be for­giv­en for dis­miss­ing Wings of Desire as pure schmaltz (City of Angels, the reduc­tive and embar­rass­ing­ly expo­si­tion­al 1998 Hol­ly­wood remake star­ring Nico­las Cage and Meg Ryan is a case in point). Arguable worse, if you saw just the first half of Wim Wen­ders’ 1987 film you might think it to be noth­ing more than a morose and pre­ten­tious cat­a­logue of quo­tid­i­an suffering.

But this would be to ignore what the film becomes: a play­ful­ly post­mod­ern mas­ter­piece with a mod­ernist sense of human­i­ty, a poem to the city of Berlin, a Hegelian mus­ing on self­hood and, yes, a love sto­ry. More than any of this, though, Wings of Desire is a unique­ly life-affirm­ing cel­e­bra­tion of humanity.

Intro­duc­ing West Berlin to us through the eyes of angels – their per­spec­tive marked by black-and-white film stock and an abil­i­ty to hear the thoughts of the human char­ac­ters we encounter – the film opens with the depress­ing and some­times dis­tress­ing inner mono­logues of the city’s inhab­i­tants as they fret in their apart­ments and cars, on planes, bicy­cles and bal­conies. We’re then intro­duced to two of the seraphim them­selves, Cassiel (Otto Sander) and Damiel (the recent­ly depart­ed Bruno Ganz), sit­ting unde­tect­ed in a car show­room convertible.

Read­ing from a note­book, Cassiel begins to recite the times of sun­rise and sun­set, the lev­els of local rivers and the events which occurred on the same date 20, 50 and 200 years before: a plane crash, the Olympic Games, the first bal­loon flight over the city. In this moment we learn how angels expe­ri­ence time, as some­thing amor­phous, eter­nal and ulti­mate­ly mean­ing­less. They then begin to speak of more poignant, per­son­al things, and it is these all too human moments which punc­tu­ate the infi­nite, giv­ing form and mean­ing to both time and life. ​“I don’t need to beget a child, or plant a tree,” says Damiel, the film’s hero, when he con­fess­es to day­dream­ing of expe­ri­enc­ing the world as humans do.

Life, to the angel who sees his­to­ry from begin­ning to end, is not about lega­cy, but engage­ment with the ongo­ing present. As he lists the things he might like to feel – to have a fever, to be excit­ed by the line of a neck, or an ear, to come home like Ray­mond Chandler’s Philip Mar­lowe and feed the cat – a seem­ing­ly self-seri­ous piece of cin­e­ma becomes a cel­e­bra­tion of small things.

The colour­less world that rep­re­sents the angels’ sen­su­al depri­va­tion is like a blank can­vas, and the poet­ic screen­play that Wen­ders co-wrote with Aus­tri­an nov­el­ist and poet Peter Hand­ke paints it with the vivid­ness of human expe­ri­ence. When Damiel encoun­ters the dying vic­tim of a motor­cy­cle acci­dent in per­haps the film’s most mov­ing scene, he soothes him by turn­ing his thoughts to mem­o­ries of life: near-pal­pa­ble images of bread, wine, rid­ing a bicy­cle with no hands, and many more world­ly things.

When he encoun­ters Peter Falk (played by Falk him­self), who used to be an angel him­self and so can sense our hero’s pres­ence, the late Colum­bo actor explains the joys of rub­bing one’s hands togeth­er for warmth, drink­ing cof­fee and smok­ing cig­a­rettes, all of which Damiel dis­cov­ers for him­self lat­er. When Damiel even­tu­al­ly becomes human, the film bursts into colour – the hues of which he must ask a stranger to define – the sud­den sat­u­ra­tion of the screen reflect­ing that of the character’s senses.

We first glimpse colour, though, when Damiel meets Mar­i­on, the beau­ti­ful and some­times melan­cholic trapeze artist he falls head over heels in love with. As she undress­es in her trail­er fol­low­ing a rehearsal at the raggedy trav­el­ling cir­cus that will soon shut down and leave her alone in West Berlin, Damiel stands by curi­ous but sex­less, lis­ten­ing atten­tive­ly to her inner thoughts as he does the film’s oth­er human char­ac­ters. When the scene switch­es briefly to colour, indi­cat­ing we are see­ing Mar­i­on now from the human per­spec­tive Damiel longs for, she puts on her dress­ing gown and, tak­ing three oranges from a bowl, begins to jug­gle. Play is a promi­nent theme here.

From Marion’s many cir­cus scenes to Damiel’s inno­cent­ly direct inter­ac­tions with chil­dren – who are telling­ly able to see him both in his angel­ic and human forms – the film ide­alis­es all things ludic and child­like because they rep­re­sent a sense of won­der at the world, a way of learn­ing to be human through expe­ri­ence. In the penul­ti­mate scene, where Mar­i­on dances on a rope that Damiel holds while he mus­es on the pair’s first night togeth­er, the con­clu­sion of their love sto­ry is not mutu­al pos­ses­sion, but a state of nov­el shared expe­ri­ence and thus con­stant play.

Wings of Desire is nei­ther so sac­cha­rine as to sug­gest that love can over­come suf­fer­ing or death – quite the oppo­site: it’s only through sub­mit­ting to time that Damiel is able to love at all – nor does is it claim that all expe­ri­ence is good. By por­tray­ing char­ac­ters who are con­scious but unable to expe­ri­ence the world, the film invites us con­stant­ly to mar­vel at the very fact of liv­ing and feel­ing at all, at the poet­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties of ​“swim­ming near the water­fall,” ​“the dear one asleep in the next room,” ​“the night flight,” of love and sex. We share in Damiel’s exul­tant self-con­scious­ness when he tells us, at the film’s end, ​“I know now what no angel knows.”