Wim Wenders'S UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD is really two movies, joined rather awkwardly at the hip. The first half of this three-hour marathon is an enjoyable, off-the-cuff road movie with a post-modernist, technological spin; the second is a half-baked, indulgent meditation on the nature
of the recorded image.
The year is 1999, and the world is on the brink of a nuclear confrontation. Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin), a disenchanted young bohemian, is involved in a lackluster relationship with novelist Eugene Fitzpatrick (Sam Neill). Driving across Europe on her way home from a decadent party, she
has a car accident that involves her with two bank robbers, Chico and Raymond (Chick Ortega and Eddy Mitchell). Claire ends up agreeing to transport their heist to Paris in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. Then she meets Sam Farber (William Hurt), an enigmatic traveler who steals some of the
loot from her car before going on his mysterious way. Enraged and intrigued, Claire sets off to track him down. Her quest takes her around the world in a cosmopolitan blur of languages, cultures and high-tech computer images, ending in the Australian outback, where Sam's father (Max von Sydow) has
a laboratory.
Sam, it develops, has been using a special camera to collect images from his global trek. His father is working on a process that will enable Sam's mother (Jeanne Moreau) to "see" these images, even though she is blind. Convinced by an absence of radio signals that a nuclear holocaust has taken
place, everyone devotes themselves to helping with Mr. Farber's experiments. Their work bears fruit; the machine not only gives sight to the blind but also allows users to view their dreams on screen. These beautiful images, however, prove dangerously addictive.
One of the most highly respected directors of the New German Cinema, Wim Wenders completed a remarkable trilogy of road movies--ALICE IN THE CITIES, WRONG MOVE and KINGS OF THE ROAD--early in his career, and made a partial return to the genre with PARIS, TEXAS. (His production company is even
called Road Movies.) The themes which illuminated those earlier movies, though--the difficulty of communication, the nature of wanderlust, urban alienation--get skimpy treatment here. The first half of the film is a flip, engaging romp which offers us some stylish visuals and a knowing, fin de siecle attitude. Once the film gets bogged down in the outback, however, it comes to a virtual stop. Wenders seems to be saying something pretty banal about the emotional emptiness of the recorded image as opposed to the "real thing." If that's the point, why make a film at all? Worth seeing
nevertheless, if only for the outstanding soundtrack and the nicely realized dream images. leave a comment