My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 22): Wim Wenders' Early Films

Alice in the Cities (1974)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Starring Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer

The Wrong Move (1975)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Starring Rüdiger Vogler and Hanna Schygulla

Kings of the Road (1976)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Starring Rüdiger Vogler and Hanns Zischler

German director Wim Wenders (b. 1945) is best known in the US for his films Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987), the latter memorably featuring Berlin guardian angels tending to the depressed inhabitants. But he first got attention a decade earlier with three “road films” that established some of the characteristics of his wry, subdued style. Each of the three features a journey by seemingly mismatched people. Each provides a view of everyday life in diverse locales like New York City and rural Germany. Each is made using extensive unscripted improvisation by the actors. And each features the talents of a decidedly non-diva actor Rüdiger Vogler, who consistently acts as an introverted foil to the madness that surrounds him.

In the first film Alice in the Cities, Vogler is paired with the excellent child actor Yella Rottländer as they search Germany for her grandmother. A writer (Vogler) becomes paired with the girl after he loses his job photographing the "real" USA for a German magazine, then has to fly home at his own expense. Somehow, he is given an 11-year-old child to take home, this after her mother (who does not know the writer) makes a last minute decision at JFK airport to stay in NYC to try to patch things up with her boyfriend. After arriving in Germany, it becomes clear that the young girl does not really know where her grandmother lives. The writer does not particularly like children, especially this annoyingly peppy one, as she interferes with his well-earned depression. They travel about West Germany, including on a cool monorail in Wuppertal, developing a bond without any overt attraction to one another. They encounter colorful characters, but the film avoids any real drama or tension points, as would normally occur in this sort of film. Instead, Wenders establishes his now-familiar style of depicting pretty normal people caught together by circumstance. In Wenders' world, the easiest thing to do is just keep going, even if the quest seems pointless or futile. At one point the writer drops the girl off at a police station so they can do a proper search for her grandmother. But she runs away and returns to him. The film ends undramatically (as in most Wenders films), as the police recover the girl and inform Winters that the mother has returned to Germany. Life goes on. What we see in this film is Wenders' talent for depicting normal people who experience normal things, yet manage to entertain you for a couple hours just by being real. It is very difficult to pull off such realist films without resorting to traditional movie and play devices. But in Wenders' movies (unlike Chekov's plays), if a gun appears in the first act, it will likely not be used later---its just a gun, after all, not a dramatic device. 

Vogler returns in the following year's The Wrong Move. Here, a dissolute young man is kicked out of his provincial home on the Baltic Sea by his mother, and has to make his own way and finally earn a living. As he travels south along the Rhine River, he gradually picks up an equally unfocused entourage of a frustrated actress (Hanna Schygulla), a schlumphy  poet, and a mute girl (the young Nastassja Kinski) who is traveling with her ex-Nazi grandfather. This movie is an update of an earlier road saga, Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795). The gang has a series of moderately compelling adventures, get to know one another a bit, then split apart, and the young man completes his north-to-south traverse of West Germany by viewing the panorama from the top of the Zugspitze. Of the three films this is perhaps the least successful, as the film always seems on the verge of meaning something symbolic about Germany (Nazis, depersonalization and commercialization). But Wenders is at his best when his movies avoid such "meaning", so the mix here seems a bit off. 

The final film Kings of the Road is the best of the trilogy. Vogler is now driving a truck along the West-East German border from boring town to boring town, showing and repairing reel-to-reel films to bored audiences. However, a VW bug blazes past him and crashes into a lake. He watches as a man (Hans Zischler) climbs out, unsuccessful in suicide after his wife left him. The man dries off, climbs in the truck, and they travel around together. This film is marvelously laconic. The two men sometimes barely speak, yet seem to have an understanding. The back story of the divorced man unfolds only very gradually (men do not share much emotion), and neither man evolves during the film, defying a cliche of such movies. They unemotionally split up at the end, one driving on in his van, the other getting on a train for an uncertain destination and future. (Wenders has a fascination for transportation, ergo planes, monorails, trains, vans, etc.). The most pulse-quickening moment of the film (if not for the characters) comes when we clinically observe one of them defecating on a sand dune (no simulations, the real thing). As in the earlier two films, Wenders’ landscapes of mostly humdrum locales have an intense beauty that makes the German countryside a constant co-star. 

Wenders’ movies have a unique feel to them. Without typical plotting devices and special effects, we focus on the beauty of normal things. The fact that each film is launched by a very atypical thing (i.e. an abandoned child, an unlikely expanding entourage, a failed VW suicide) makes the contrasting naturalistic, understated play-out of each movie all the more interesting. I am not quite sure how this director pulls this off, but one is left with a sense of warmth about everyday life after seeing a Wenders film. It’s as if the director feels that once he pushes his movie over the top of the dramatic hill using some improbable initial plot device, now he can let things play out--not by manipulation, but simply by letting his actors improvise and let life run its course.