Classic Movie Review: Until the End of the World (1991)

Until the End of the World (1991) 

Directed by: Wim Wenders.

Written by: Peter Carey and Wim Wenders and Solveig Dommartin and Michael Almereyda.

Starring: Solveig Dommartin (Claire Tourneur), William Hurt (Sam Farber, alias Trevor McPhee), Sam Neill (Eugene Fitzpatrick), Rüdiger Vogler (Phillip Winter), Max von Sydow (Henry Farber), Jeanne Moreau (Edith Farber), Kuniko Miyake (Mrs. Mori), Chishû Ryû (Mr. Mori), Eddy Mitchell (Rayond Monnet), Adelle Lutz (Makiko), Ernie Dingo (Burt), David Gulpilil (David), Jimmy Little (Peter), Chick Ortega (Chico Remy), Elena Smirnova (Krasikova), Lois Chiles (Elsa Farber).

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens to great directors as they grow older – the differing paths they can take. You can become someone like Martin Scorsese, who changes and evolves with the film industry – still finding ways to produce your art, in a new system that is still undeniably yours. You can be like Clint Eastwood, who seemingly has stubbornly refused to evolve – meaning some of his late films seem like Old Man Yells at Cloud the Movie, but can also produce some interesting contrasts when they work well. Or you can be like Francis Ford Coppola, who basically says screw it, and barely works at all – doing smaller films, when he wants, how he wants. Finally, you can become like Wim Wenders, who has continued to work steadily over the years, but hasn’t produced anything to rival his output in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was one of the best directors in the world, in years. I’m sure we all have our favorite late Wenders film – I personally quite liked his Don’t Coming Knocking (2005), which reteamed him with Sam Shepherd, 20 years after their masterpiece Paris, Texas. But seriously, is anything he’s made in the past 25 years close to the films like Alice in the Cities, Kings of the Road, The American Friend, Paris Texas or Wings of Desire where his reputation was built?

 

Watching the final cut of Wenders’ Until the End of the World (1991) – nearly five hours in all – perhaps gives some insight into what precisely happened with Wenders. As Bilge Ebiri says in essay for the Criterion Collection DVD of this film, Wenders was coming off of Paris, Texas – his ultimate film about America, a country he was obsessed with, and Wings of Desire, his ultimate film about his home country of Germany, which was still divided as it had been all of his life, when he made Until the End of the World. Watching this cut, you get the impression that Wenders is throwing everything he has into this film – every idea, every daring stylistic choice, every cinematic influence all onto the screen in one magnum opus. Perhaps after that, he was just all out of ideas.

 

To describe the plot of the film would take too long – probably as long as the movie itself – but to boil it down to its essentials, for the first three hours or so of the final cut, Until the End of the World is a kind of globetrotting adventure movie, with lots of genre elements, that Wenders puts there, but clearly has little interest in. It follows Claire (Solveig Dommartin) as she meets a man she first thinks is named Trevor, but will find out his real name is Sam (played by William Hurt) – and for some reason, won’t just let him get away. They first meet by happenstance – on the road – as she is transporting a lot of money for a pair of bank robbers, only to find he has taken some of that money. She hires a P.I. and tracks him down again – and loses him again. And on and on and on. The film is narrated by Eugene (Sam Neill), Claire’s ex, who says he wants her back, but doesn’t really do much to make that happen, and doesn’t seem too invested in actually doing it either.

 

The film was shot all over the world – Germany, Portugal, Russia, France, America, Japan, Italy – and eventually settles in Australia, for its final act. It’s here we meet Sam’s parents – played by Max von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau – and the full scope of what has been going on becomes clear. Sydow has essentially created a machine that can record images, and then interacts with memories, which can then be projected into the mind’s eye of someone else – someone blind. And that’s just the first machine – wait until you get to the machine that can record dreams – a handheld device that basically obsesses people, turning them into mindless zombies staring at a screen, who freak out when the battery dies.

 

I probably should have pointed out by now that the film takes place a decade in the future – all the in 1999 – during a time of great stress for humanity, as an Indian nuclear satellite has reentered orbit, and perhaps threatens all of humanity (I may have the details wrong on that – it doesn’t matter). So this is Wenders version of the future, now our past. It is somewhat remarkable to watch this vision of the future from Wenders now, knowing where we’d end up. You do see a lot of devices that look somewhat like we have now – and some that don’t. The film is also one of the first to utilize a lot of digital technology – photography – and what Wenders and his genius cinematographer, Robby Muller, do with it is remarkable. While the film was a financial disaster at the time, the soundtrack was a huge hit – made up of songs by famous artists like Talking Heads, R.E.M. Patti Smith, Lou Reed among others – friends of Wenders, who were intrigued when he called them up and asked them for a song that would represent what they would sound like in 1999. The result is songs that don’t really song like they come from any era – most of these artists got it wrong, but it’s fascinating to see them attempt it.

 

And it’s fascinating to see Wenders attempt what he does here as well. The film was butchered when it was released in 1991 – Wenders knew he couldn’t really deliver what he was supposed to – a two-and-a-half-hour film, so he tried to convince the backers to let him release two films running five hours, and got a no. So, even while he edited his film down to the 157-minute version that played, to negative reviews, and no box office, in 1991, he held onto his own negative of his work print, and kept working on that (making a director’s cut, something rarely done at the time). By the mid-1990s, he would be showing this longer cut in various venues (actually various cuts). And slowly, the reputation of this forgotten failure grew.

 

Seeing the film now is somewhat miraculous. No one is going to call Until the End of the World is flawless film – it isn’t. But it’s one of the most ambitious films ever made – one in which Wenders gets everything on screen he could want. Watching the films early scenes, you can almost play spot the reference – picking up moments from Godard in the early traffic jams, or Ozu in the scenes in Japan – starring some of Ozu’s favorite actors. Some Bergman here, some Ford there, some Antonioni there. And yet, somehow, all Wenders from beginning to end. It’s the oddest of films – the most ambitious of films. It looks fantastic. It has strange images and performances. It was a difficult shoot – it strained the relationship between Wenders and Muller, according to Roger Ebert the two stars weren’t talking off camera by the end, etc. But now, it’s all there onscreen. Perhaps having made this film – and everything he made leading up to it – Wenders just didn’t have anything else to say after. It would make sense.

Classic Movie Review: Kings of the Road (1976)

Kings of the Road (1976) 

Directed by: Wim Wenders.

Written by: Wim Wenders.

Starring: Rüdiger Vogler (Bruno Winter), Hanns Zischler (Robert Lander), Lisa Kreuzer (Pauline, cashier), Rudolf Schündler (Robert's Father), Marquard Bohm (Man Who Lost His Wife), Hans Dieter Trayer (Paul, garage owner), Franziska Stömmer (Cinema owner), Patric Kreuzer (Little boy).

 

Kings of the Road is the final film in Wim Wenders’ loosely connected Road Trilogy – made in three consecutive years in the mid-1970s. It’s the longest and best of the three films. All three films have different views of the road – none of them overly romantic. Alice in the Cities is about a writer in search of something that is no longer there. Wrong Move is about a writer who goes to the road in search of answers – and comes back with none. Kings of the Road is about two men who spend time on the road as a way to hide – a way to avoid real life, real connections, real emotions. When you spend all your time driving from one place to the next – you never have to settle down, never have to connect with anyone. One of the two men may just be a road lifer – someone who will find any excuse to stay out there on the road. The other is only there temporarily – he may not be any more successful in his real life when he returns – but at least he’s trying.

 

The film opens with a long scene between Bruno (Wenders’ favorite Rüdiger Vogler) and a small town cinema owner. The owner has run this theater for years – he had to sue to get it back in the early 1950s, because he was a party member. The theater used to be enough to support him and his family – but not anymore. Bruno, who makes his living driving from own small theater to another in these towns along the border between West and East Germany, observes that in 10 years, all of these small town theaters will be gone – many are gone already, and the ones still around aren’t making the money they used to. Bruno can do whatever is needed in the theaters – he repairs projects, speakers, etc. – and he travels around in his large van with all of his equipment. He sleeps in the back, eats from places on the side of the road – and yes, we even see him shit there as well. He’s been doing for two years – by himself – and there’s no sign he’s stopping.

 

The other man who will eventually join Bruno is Robert Lander (Hanns Zischler) – a pediatrician of sorts, who we first see flying down the road in his convertible – which he then crashes into a pond in a pathetic suicide attempt. It doesn’t work of course, and he sheepishly walks out of the water, and needs a ride. Bruno has witnessed this whole thing – and agrees. Robert tries to explain some things – he and his wife is getting a divorce, etc. – but Bruno cuts him off. No backstories he warns. And for the most part, Robert agrees. For the next three hours, they are on the road together – often barely saying a word.

 

There is a lengthy section in the middle of the film where the pair split apart. They are near Robert’s hometown, and he goes back to see his father for the first time in years – his father never even met Robert’s wife, that he is now separated from. He is there to confront his father for his past – for the way he treated his mother. His father runs a small town newspaper – not coincidentally, another dying industry – and he doesn’t quite know what to say to his son. While this is happening, Bruno is at another small town movie theater – this one surviving by showing porno films – and he spends time helping out, and flirting with the cashier – Pauline (Lisa Kreuzer). Their scenes together are tender and sweet – but also shows perhaps why Bruno is on the road in the first place. He’s awkward around her – has difficulty interacting with her, and pretty much ends up hiding away again – this time in the projector booth. She has to come and get him from there.

 

As with all three films in the trilogy, Kings of the Road is about Germany reconciling itself to its past – a past that is still there in their everyday lives. The former Nazis are getting older, but they’re still there. It is also, much like Alice in the Cities was, about the Americanization of Germany - in the words of one of the characters America has “colonized their subconscious”. It’s about the declining German film industry – there is a reason all these theaters are closing. The New German Cinema was alive and well at this time (it’s actually closer to the end of that period rather than the beginning) – but didn’t exactly draw large audiences. Kings of the Road – one of the best of this period – is perhaps proof why. How many people really do want to see a three hour, black and white film like this?

 

Well, you should – we all should. It is a brilliant movie, occasionally very entertaining – an extended silent movie gag the two men play out behind the screen for an audience of kids is quite funny. And it is a very insightful film into these two men – and men in general, and their problems with women. Pauline, the cashier, is the only major female character – and she’s in the movie for perhaps 20 minutes. The rest of the movie is about these two men, who have problems communicating – even with each other. It’s rather telling that after they truly reveal something about themselves to each other – a long night in an abandoned shed – that they almost immediately have to part ways.

 

On its own, Kings of the Road is a great film. Taken together with Alice in the Cities and Wrong Move – it’s even better. All three films act as a time capsule of a certain moment in German history – that postwar period, where the children of those alive in the war started to come of age, and had to reckon with what their parents had done – and a way forward for themselves. It was a dark time, and Wenders’ captures it well in these three films – aided wonderfully by cinematography Robby Muller – doing his best work of the trilogy here – alongside Vogler and Zischler and Kreuzer. It’s been a while since Wenders made a great film – or perhaps even a good film. But here, at his weak (which would last at least another decade or so – since we still had The American Friend, Paris Texas and Wings of Desire to go) – he was making films as good as anyone. If it weren’t for Paris, Texas – Kings of the Road may well have been his masterpiece.

Classic Movie Review: Wrong Move (1975)

Wrong Move (1975) 

Directed by: Wim Wenders.

Written by: Peter Handke based on the novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Starring: Rüdiger Vogler (Wilhelm), Hans Christian Blech (Laertes), Hanna Schygulla (Therese Farner), Nastassja Kinski (Mignon), Peter Kern (Bernhard Landau), Ivan Desny (Industrieller / The Industrialist), Marianne Hoppe (Mutter / The Mother), Lisa Kreuzer (Janine), Adolf Hansen (Schaffner).

 

It’s hard to make a movie about a misanthrope and not have it be a miserable experience. It’s kind of remarkable that Paul Thomas Anderson pulled it off with There Will Be Blood (2007), but most of the time the result is more like Wim Wenders Wrong Move (1975) – the second film in his road movie trilogy, made in three consecutive years in the mid-1970s. On the surface, it doesn’t have much in common with Alice in the Cities (1974) – the first of the three films. That film was naturalistic and shot in gorgeous black and white, and was about a writer (Rüdiger Vogler) travelling across America by himself – and then going from one small town to another in Germany, alongside a little girl he hardly knows. That film was nostalgic in a way – and the writer was searching for an American that was no longer there (and has changed even more since) and then seeing something similar in Germany.

 

div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"> Wrong Move stars the same actor - Rüdiger Vogler – again as a writer, this time called Wilhelm. And again, he is travelling across Germany – this time with a group of people he barely knows. They are all drifters, of a sort – all kind of sleepwalking through their empty lives. And this time, Wenders and his cinematographer – the great Robby Muller – shoot the film, brilliantly, in color. In its way though, the film is connected with Alice in the Cities in that both films act as kind of time capsules – for a specific moment in time. You can see why Wrong Move was so acclaimed in its time in Germany – where it won most of the major awards for its year. And you can also see why the film hasn’t aged as well – as Germany has moved away from where it was at that moment. It is a portrait of a country and a people paralyzed by guilt and remorse – where there were still a lot of people around from the war, living their lives – and now their children were becoming adults, and not knowing what to do about their parents’ generation. It remains a key film in the German New Wave – but one that is probably more interesting in historical context than a film unto itself.

 

In the film, Wilhelm kind of gathers is motley crew of drifters. His mother (Marianne Hope) has sold her store, and has given him some money to travel – essentially, just to get him out of the house, where he complains about his inability to write - probably because he longs for connection with others in his writing, but pretty much hates everyone else. His travelling crew eventually includes a street singer, Laerees (Hans Christian Blech) and his mute juggler daughter of 14, Mignon (Natassja Kinski), actress Therese (Hanna Schygulla) and a really bad poet named Bernhard (Peter Kern). They travel around – by train, and then by car – often essentially delivering monologues to each other about their misery. They will eventually end up at the home of an Industrialist (Ivan Desny) by mistake, who they walk in on just as he’s about to kill himself, and he decides to delay that for a while. He has a few of those misery monologues of his own to deliver.

 

Schygulla and Desny would of course go on to play key roles in a masterpiece of German cinema – The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) by Rainer Werner Fassbiner. Desny’s role is even kind of similar – in that he is playing a miserable industrialist, marked for death. Schygulla is kind of wasted as the actress however – in a film that doesn’t really know what to do with its female characters – Kinski fares slightly better, perhaps because she is mute, and in essence, remains more mysterious than everyone else.

 

The film is a technical marvel by Wenders and Muller – highlighted by a very long shot of the various characters walking through a mountain path – their dialogue punctuated by distant gunshots (they were apparently real – from hunters nearby, but it works so well you would think it was a deliberate choice).  Wenders and Mueller find just the right look for the film though – from the road scenes, to the house of the industrialist that is falling down around them, to the streets they walk on after they leave. If nothing else, Wrong Move is a great looking film.

 

Wrong Move is ultimately a road movie about the pointlessness of the road movie. Most road movies have the main character learn a lesson along the way – becoming a better person when they return to the place they started their journey. What Wilhelm doesn’t really seem to learn anything on his journey – and neither does anyone else. He’s just as hopeless and misanthropic as ever- and the journey in the film doesn’t really end, as much as the characters just start drifting away from each other. It’s an odd ending, and perhaps a deliberately unsatisfying one. The Wrong Move for Wilhelm was leaving in the first place. And perhaps that’s what connects it most to Alice in the Cities – in that in both, the main characters are searching for something that isn’t there anymore – and perhaps, never was.

Classic Movie Review: Alice in the Cities (1974)

Alice in the Cities (1974) 

Directed by: Wim Wenders.

Written by: Wim Wenders and Veith von Fürstenberg.

Starring: Rüdiger Vogler (Philip 'Phil' Winter), Yella Rottländer (Alice), Lisa Kreuzer (Lisa - Alice's Mother), Edda Köchl (Angela - Friend in New York), Ernest Boehm (Publisher), Sam Presti (Car Dealer), Lois Moran (Airport Hostess), Didi Petrikat (Friend in Frankfurt), Hans Hirschmüller (Police Officer), Sibylle Baier (The Woman).

 

The first film in Wim Wenders so called Road Trilogy is one of the simplest films Wenders ever made. It begins with a German journalist – recurring Wenders character Phil Winter (Rüdiger Vogler) travelling across America by car, and supposedly writing a story about America’s wide open spaces, but instead just taking a lot of pictures. When he gets to New York, his editor isn’t happy that he hasn’t written anything, and Phil has to get home to Berlin quickly, to write something – he’s low on money to boot. It’s in the airport that he meets Lisa (Lisa Kreuzer) and her daughter Alice (Yella Rottländer) – all of about 8. She’s also German, also needs to get home quickly – but like Phil, is stranded until the next flight the following day. They spend the night at a hotel together – not sexually – and when he wakes up, he finds that Lisa has essentially abandoned Alice in his care – telling him to fly off to Amsterdam with her daughter, and she’ll be along the next day. Against his better judgment, he does that – but, of course, Lisa doesn’t show up. They spend time in Amsterdam together, and then head to a series of small German towns – apparently looking for Alice’s grandmother. Alice doesn’t have an address – but knows where she lives, at least she thinks she does.

 

In many ways, Alice in the Cities works as a time capsule movie – capturing things that will never exist again. This is evident in the very premise of the plot of course – it would be unthinkable today for a stranger to take a Transatlantic flight with an 8-year-old they didn’t know these days. But it’s also in Phil’s view of America – and in particular New York. The New York we see here is in many ways tourist-y (the only way I’ve ever really seen it) – but that makes sense, since Phil himself is a tourist. You see landmarks that are gone forever, or forever changed in New York. In a sense, the romantic notion of driving across America is gone now too. What was once a chance to see a bunch of individual small towns and cities, each unique in their own way, would now just be a series of strip malls and chain stores – so that each place is exactly like the last. That is already sinking into to Phil as he drives across America anyway – and will become even clearer in Germany, as they go to one small town after another. The existential ennui is the same wherever he goes – Europe has become Americanized, somehow robbing both places of what once made them special.

 

In a strange way, what keeps Alice in the Cities from being just pretentious existential longing without much of a point is Alice herself – played in a remarkable performance by Rottländer. Her Alice is very much still a kid, and Wenders treats her as such. She is childlike in the way she talks and thinks – the way she lies to Phil. The way she sneaks off to a bathroom at the airport to cry when she realizes her mother isn’t there to collect her yet. There is a childlike simplicity to the way she sees things that plays nicely off of Phil. They have a goofy sort of chemistry together. The dialogue Wenders gives her would sound too simplistic, too on the nose, coming out of an adult’s mouth – but from a child, it makes sense. So many adults don’t know how to write for children – so they end up being little adults. Wenders doesn’t make this mistake.

 

The film was shot on 16MM by the great Robby Muller – who would be one of Wim Wenders best collaborators (and later, would do the same for Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier). Alice in the Cities is a beautiful film, but also an empty one. It captures these two contradictions perfectly. I don’t know how the film played when it came out in 1974 – today, it plays as if Phil is longing for a time that has already past, and we experience it also as a time that has long past – not just what he looked back to, but as us looking at him. Alice somehow grounds him – doesn’t allow him to become lost in his nostalgia for something he never experienced. Kids will do that to you.

Movie Review: Pina

Pina ***
Directed By: Wim Wenders.

I am not a big fan of dance, and unlike other critics who tell you that it in a movie like Pina you don’t need to be a fan of dance to appreciate the movie, I’m not going to say that. It would certainly help to know something about dance walking into Wim Wenders’ new dance documentary that is really a tribute to German choreographer Pina Bausch. She was supposed to collaborate with Wenders on this documentary, but suddenly died a few days before shooting was supposed to begin. So instead of a simple dance documentary, what Pina really is an elegy to Wenders’ friend. Not only do we get to see her stock company deliver four of her most famous routines (not in their entirety, but close to it) the film also gives her closer collaborators a chance to pay tribute to her – by speaking about their feelings for her, and by giving small snippets of their own favourite Pina dances, sprinkled throughout the movie. For fans of dance, Pina will likely be one of their favourite films of the year. For someone like me, whose knowledge of dance is limited to what I have picked up on So You Think You Can Dance over the years, the result was more scattershot. Yes, the film looks amazing from start to finish, and the dance numbers do have a hypnotic power to them in their best moments. But I never quite feel in love with any of them, and not knowing who Pina Bausch was walking into the theatre, I could not share the participant’s feelings for her. I felt kept at an arm’s length from much of the proceedings.

The dancing in Pina is terrific. There is no denying that, even if I don’t understand it on a deeper level like some do. All I can do is watch the movement on display, and be mesmerized. The first dance sequence is probably my favourite – there is primal rhythm on display, and the movement matches that, and seethes with sexuality. It gets Pina off on a high note – and one I don’t think it will quite match again, despite how good the other three massive dance numbers are. Again, I don’t know much about dance, but I know what I like – and I liked most of what was on display in this film.

I also enjoyed the little asides – the small snippets of other Pina dances that are sprinkled throughout the movie that take place outside, in a field, on a mountain, in a greenhouse, on the streets, or wherever the dancers felt best captured their feel. These are smaller – mostly just one or two people, and give you an intimacy that the larger numbers do not have. By displaying both, I think Wenders goal was to capture Pina on both a large and small scale.

The spoken tributes in Pina are what didn’t really work for me. Wenders plays these tributes as voiceovers, and shoots the speaker simply sitting looking into the camera. I’m sure to some this will work, but again I didn’t know Pina Bausch before I saw this movie, or her work. The movie itself only provides a few brief moments of footage of her – not nearly enough to get to know her. So while you feel their grief is genuine, it also holds you outside of it – as if you’re looking at a moment you shouldn’t be looking at. I couldn’t feel their grief the same way they did – or really on any real level.

For those who love dance, I think Pina will be one of their favourite films of 2011. It is at times thrilling to see these dancers work at the top of their game, and I have feeling they’ll appreciate things on a higher level than I did. For me, as much as I admired Pina, I was never truly involved with it. It is a visual masterwork, and on that level, it should be seen by anyone who has the slightest interest in it. But as an emotional experience, Pina left me cold.

The Best Films I Have Never Seen Before: The American Friend (1977)

The American Friend (1977) *** ½ 

Directed by: Wim Wenders.

Written by: Wim Wenders based on Ripley’s Game by Patricia Highsmith.

Starring: Dennis Hopper (Tom Ripley), Bruno Ganz (Jonathan Zimmermann), Lisa Kreuzer (Marianne Zimmermann), Gérard Blain (Raoul Minot), Nicholas Ray (Derwatt), Samuel Fuller (Der Amerikaner), Peter Lilienthal (Marcangelo), Daniel Schmid (Igraham), Sandy Whitelaw (Arzt in Paris), Jean Eustache (Freundlicher Mann), Lou Castel (Rodolphe).

I am currently making my way through Patricia Highsmith’s masterful Tom Ripley novels, and decided I should go back and check out the cinematic representations of her sociopathic “hero”. I had only seen Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (which is far and away the best film of his all too short directorial career), but considering that Wim Wenders was one of the most interesting directors in the world at the time he made The American Friend, an adaption of the third Ripley book, Ripley’s Game, I decided to start there.

Wenders film doesn’t seem all that interested in Highsmith’s plot – which is odd, because he went to great lengths to adapt one of her books (he discovered that all of her books had already been optioned, and he couldn’t get the rights to any of them, but when she heard, she offered to supply with the as yet unpublished Ripley’s Game). This is a film much more about attitude and style, than about plot, which means that at times, it is confusing because there is so much plot in the movie. Wenders it seems, is more interested in making a commentary on American crime movies – and their influence on European film – than on a crime film himself. What is remarkable however is that The American Friend, while certainly an intellectual exercise on behalf of Wenders, is still a rather remarkable, fascinating little film.

The film opens in Germany, where Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is now making his living dealing in high end art forgeries. We first meet him dealing with his forger (the famed filmmaker Nicholas Ray), and then he’s off to an art auction. It is there that he meets Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), once a highly sought after art restorer, who now makes a measly living with his little picture framing shop. He has leukemia, and a wife and young son, who he is worried about leaving behind. At the auction, he snubs Ripley’s simple offer of a handshake – and this simple slight turns into something that will forever alter his life. It seems that an old associate of Ripley’s needs someone killed – and wants to use someone outside of his regular organization, which brought him to Ripley. Ripley does not want to job, but suggests Zimmermann. No, he’s not a professional killer, but he can be manipulated into doing it for the money. And thus, Ripley can have his revenge on him for slighting him.

Dennis Hopper’s take on Tom Ripley is slightly odd, but that simply adds to his appeal. He certainly enters the movie with a history, but the movie never hints at it – so unless you’ve read the other novels, you have no idea what it is. He seems to be playing the role of the “Ugly American”, with his big cowboy hat, and lazy drawl. He doesn’t seem like quite the cold, calculating sociopath from the books or the other movies. And yet, I couldn’t help but like Hopper’s performance. He keeps Ripley an enigma in the movie, keeps you guessing as to who he is. If his name wasn’t Ripley, it wouldn’t be as initially disconcerting as it is here. Besides, Wenders’ film certainly centers more on Zimmermann, and the great Bruno Ganz gives a fascinating performance in that role as well. It’s more straight forward than Hopper’s Ripley, but equally complex.

Wenders’ film is one that is all about style. It borrows elements from American crime movies, and even winks at the audience by casting directors like Ray and Samuel Fuller (chomping a cigar, naturally), who made their share of crime movies in America in small roles (the French director Jean Eustache also appears). The plot is deliberately confusing at times – we are stuck filing in a lot of the blanks ourselves – but this is part of Wenders point. Many crime films are on autopilot, so we can predict where it is going before it gets there – Wenders trusts we’ll do the same thing here.

Wim Wenders is a fascinating, German filmmaker – part of the German New Wave that emerged in the 1970s. I have never had a chance to see his films like Alice in the Cities or Kings of the Road, but into the 1980s, he made some truly great films like Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987). He seems fascinated by American film, and a film like The American Friend or Paris, Texas (or hell, even Don’t Come Knocking from a few years ago), takes the outline of an American film, and yet has a distinctly European art film feel to them. The disconnect is fascinating, and when it works, it works wonderfully well. It works in The American Friend. We are always aware we are watching a movie, that Wenders is behind the scenes pulling the strings, and yet somehow the film works. It is one of Wenders best films.