Originally envisioned as a documentary about the aftermath of Hiroshima, this film became something else once the young novelist Marguerite Duras got involved: not so much a story as a mental and emotional experience, one which simultaneously unfolds along parallel, coexisting but forever disconnected tracks. Two lovers, two marriages, two cities, two theaters of war, two traumas, and last but not least, two different planes of existence. Resnais and Duras distinguish between the transformatively powerful pasts that the French heroine wishes to imagine (her Japanese lover's and the city of Hiroshima's) or re-experience (her own past; specifically a doomed love between her and a German soldier) and the cool, jagged fragments of memory and empathy that she is actually able to conjure up.
"Hiroshima," critic Barry Forshaw writes, show us "...
how history and the past are always seen through present eyes; and likewise the writing of history-as-narrative is wrought with the imperfections of language, memory and history itself." "Wings of Desire." (Wim Wenders, 1987) To be able to eavesdrop on people's thoughts is to be like God, or an angel, or a moviegoer.
But the hero, eavesdropping angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz) becomes mortal. He loses his ability to gaze into the souls of mortals, but gains the chance to woo a onetime object of his eavesdropping, a beautiful trapeze artist (Solvieg Dommartin) who wears fake angel's wings and flies on wires. While Damiel is ethereal, he hears (narrated, fragmented) thoughts that run the gamut from mundane to amusing to deeply moving.
But although he can imprint some good feelings on his mortal subjects, he can't make their lives tangibly better. Descending from heaven to earth, he trades detachment for immersion, omniscence for subjectivity. None of this could be communicated without the narration.
The screenplay, narration included, was written by Wenders and poet Peter Handke, and draws on images and themes from Rainier Maria Rilke's poetry. "Days of Heaven." (Terrence Malick, 1978) Malick's World War I Texas Panhandle drama -- about a love triangle between a young, rich, sickly landowner (Sam Shepard), a beautiful young immigrant worker (Brooke Adams) and the lover who pretends to be her brother (Richard Gere) -- juxtaposes innocent-to-banal narration by an ex-street urchin (12-year old Linda Manz) against luminous images of an endless grass sea.
The contrast between the girl's understanding of life and life itself is the film's aesthetic backbone; the tension between the girl's casually affected wisdom and the actuality of her life is sad, funny and mysterious. The narration, which talks of heaven and hell, sin and apocalypse, runs parallel to Malick's images of rare frolics and idylls, much toil and accidental death, real pestilence and fire. The girl's perceptions never really intersect with, much less engage with, the world.
Yet she is still a part of it. (What I say here goes for "Badlands" as well.) Originally envisioned as a documentary about the aftermath of Hiroshima, this film became something else once the young novelist Marguerite Duras got involved: not so much a story as a mental and emotional experience, one which simultaneously unfolds along parallel, coexisting but forever disconnected tracks.
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