Wings of Desire

A feast for the eyes is the main film by Wim Wenders. Beautiful, poetic, sublime, and with Nick Cave.

"This is one of the most curious paradoxes in the history of cinema, essentially a radical experiment that brings together the unconnected: the documentary reality of Berlin and its inhabitants (the film features non-professional actors, and Nick Cave and Peter Falk play themselves) with a conditional schematic fairy tale about an angel who falls in love with an aerial acrobat from a traveling circus.

The film suddenly became a nationwide hit and a favorite of the public, being quoted to the point of a laughable Hollywood remake with Nicolas Cage. "Wings of Desire" is more complex than it seems, a romantic plot is just a cover for it. It's a film about the impossibility of reconciling reality with artificially constructed fantasy, about the futility of any idealism, about the irreversibly changing world, and about the fluid nature of indomitable evil.

It's also a film not just invented by a writer but about a writer. The angel Damiel (poignantly beautiful Bruno Ganz), who abandoned his angelic nature and rejected black-and-white immortality in favor of colorful earthly love, writes his reflections on paper in the first and last frames of the film, and the old storyteller nicknamed Homer (Kurt Boa, who also starred in "Casablanca") seems to be trying to gather disparate impressions and memories into a single coherent narrative but cannot."

In the closing credits, it is stated that the film "is dedicated to all former angels, but especially to Yasujiro, Francois, and Andrei." This refers to the film directors Yasujiro Ozu, Francois Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky.