Wings of Desire

"When the child was a child It walked with its arms swinging, wanted the brook to be a river, the river to be a torrent, and this puddle to be the sea."

I almost want to say this is a movie to be watched on a peaceful Sunday with a cup of strong black coffee in your hand for no easily explainable reason. If you're not in the right mood, it might sound like German to a foreign ear. If you're in the right mood, whatever that is, you were about to open a poetry book even if you didn't realize it, but instead you sat down to watching this fairy tale about angels telling you the tragic story of the human being who's, in an ancient definition, a fallen angel remembering the memories of the child who walks out into the world to discover and to lose its innocence.

There are a lot of familiar faces and sounds, Nick Cave, Lt. Columbo playing himself as Peter Falk (When Wim Wenders offers the role to Peter Falk, he says "I need a former angel". Columbo's reply is "How did you know?"), the song Karli Kayin Ormani'nda you hear in the Turkish neighborhood of Berlin sung by Livaneli. Another familiar friend is Peter Handke whose voice you can hear here and there in the script.

"When the child was a child, It was the time for these questions: Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? Is life under the sun not just a dream? Is what I see and hear and smell not just an illusion of a world before the world? Given the facts of evil and people, does evil really exist? How can it be that I, who I am, didn’t exist before I came to be, and that, someday, I, who I am, will no longer be who I am? continued

In the end, it's such a relief to switch to color from black&white, to fall from the sky and experience being a human being, with the pain, pleasure, longing, smelling, touching, swearing, smiling and deciding, deciding to live your destiny, which is eternity in the brief history of each life.

If you enjoy this movie, also watch Faraway, So Close!