Fulfilling a promise to continue his story at the end of 1988's WINGS OF DESIRE, Wim Wenders has reassembled most of his cast, including his Berlin "angels," in a typically odd mixture of moods and genres that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1993 Cannes festival.
Unlike Damiel (Bruno Ganz), who gave up being an angel after falling in love with trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), protagonist Cassiel (Otto Sander) is still ethereal, but he can't escape his yearning to become human. When he observes a young girl (Aline Krajewski) about to fall from
the balcony of her high-rise apartment, he descends to earth and catches her, instantly becoming human by interfering in human events. Emit Flesti (Willem Dafoe), a kind of angel supervisor, is determined to make Cassiel pay for his transgression and begins by having him thrown in jail his first
day on Earth. Cassiel calls upon his old friend Damiel, now a pizza baker happily married to Marion, to bail him out. From there, Cassiel suffers a fit of despair from which he's rallied first by a Lou Reed song he hears at a concert, then by Reed himself. Repeatedly asking himself the question
Reed poses in his song, "Why can't I be good?," Cassiel sets about righting the lives of the people he once observed.
Unlike WINGS, which really had no plot until its last half hour, when Damiel became human, FARAWAY has too much for its own good. Following the action almost requires a road map, and even with one, as Peter Falk (as himself) demonstrates during a walking tour of the newly reopened East Berlin,
it's still easy to get lost. Yet, even when Wenders is at his most narratively obtuse, his films still have an odd habit of effortlessly tossing off inspired, privileged moments. What may come as a surprise is that, as a spirit of wry amusement gradually overtakes the director's usual Germanic
gloom, FARAWAY emerges as the closest Wenders has come to making a feel-good film. leave a comment
