Haunting. Wim Wenders's second feature film and his first collaboration with the Austrian novelist-poet-playwright Peter Handke is an adaptation of Handke's short novel about a soccer goalie driven to murder.
From the start of Wenders's film, the personality of the goalie, Josef Bloch (Arthur Brauss), is evident. While the game's action take place at one end of the field, Bloch waits at his net at the opposite end. As play nears, he takes little notice, walks in front of his net, and stands completely
still as the ball is kicked past him. Bloch is a character who considers it pointless to try to evade or outwit the course of events. He leaves the team (whose popularity has taken them around the world) and begins to wander. He visits movie theaters, plays American songs on jukeboxes, drinks,
encounters people, and observes life as it passes him by. After he meets a cinema cashier named Gloria (Erika Pluhar)--which, as she reminds him, is spelled G-L-O-R-I-A as in the rock 'n' roll song by Them--Bloch returns with her to her apartment and, eventually, strangles her for no apparent
reason.
Wenders, who has long professed his fascination with America, its films, and its music, cannot make an American-style picture. Instead, he presents a meditative, fragmentary reconstruction of the killer's mind, his distorted perceptions, his personal morality, and the otherwise unimportant events
in his daily existence. While most directors insist on sensationalizing acts of violence and perpetuating the myth of the outlaw hero, Wenders, in this portrait of a killer, delivers one of cinema's most truthful depictions of the criminal. leave a comment
