Wings Of Desire (Der Himmel Uber Berlin) Review

Having reached the end of the road movie in 1984 with the Palme d'Or winning Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders turned his gaze to the heavens for this haunting metaphysical fantasy about divine desire and the pleasures of the flesh.

Gorgeously shot in a coded combination of black and white and colour, Wings Of Desire is a far more dense and ambitious enterprise than the sparse journeys of self-discovery Wenders undertook in the 1970s. It's also the only time the director has successfully folded his yearning for a form of filmmaking that reaches with one hand for the sublime, and with the other for rock 'n' roll, into a coherent, cohesive whole. Wings Of Desire is both an elegy and an allegory, built round a seductive philosophical speculation: what price the trade-off between knowing everything yet feeling nothing, as do Berlin's immortal angels, and knowing nothing yet feeling everything, as do the city's mortal humans?

The stately opening sequence is a tour of Berlin, still a divided city in 1987. Eavesdropping on all its tragedies, triumphs, dreams and delusions are Damiel (Ganz) and Cassiel (Sander), unobserved guardian angels visible only to children. They drift through the city, tenderly dispensing comfort to those they feel need it, but otherwise remain unseen spectators of the great game below.

For Damiel, this endless state of privileged detachment is no longer enough. He wants to eat, drink, love and lie with the rest of humanity. "To guess instead of always knowing," he says in the film's great statement of angelic anguish. "To say 'yea' instead of 'amen'."

Also in the picture is Peter Falk (described merely as 'The Filmstar' in the original credits) who, as insistent TV 'tec Columbo, exhibited the same wearily benign demeanour as the film's own trenchcoat-wearing angels. Swinging through the story too is trapeze artist Marion (Domartin, Wenders' partner in the 1980s; she died in 2007). Just as Marion reaches nightly for the sky in the big top, so Damiel is seduced down to earth - in love with her, the angel engineers his own fall and tastes the bittersweet fruits of the flesh - an experience he isn't entirely able to process.