Faraway, So Close! (1993, Germany, d. Wenders)
Never-finished business. Just six years after Wings of Desire, Wenders rightly realized that Berlin needed re-documenting. Putting Otto Sander’s Cassiel on the path to mortality — a coda that had wound up on Wings’ cutting room floor — the director simultaneously wanted to explore the reunification and reach back into the city’s Nazi past.
Whereas Bruno Ganz’ Damiel had wanted to become human simply to experience life, Cassiel wants to Do Good Things; this becomes his downfall, as he amiably winds up a lackey for an ex-pat crime lord. (According to Wenders, the flood of guns from the East made it cheaper to use real guns on the production than props.) The crime lord, meanwhile, is searching for the family his father left behind when fleeing the country in the 1930s.
Messing with everything is a never-defined character played by Willem Defoe, Emit Flesti. Emit interacts with humans and angels, in b&w and in color, tends toward grand pronouncements like, “Time is the absence of money.” His name is “Time Itself” spelled backwards — something near-impossible to pick up while watching a film, and something that doesn’t seem to matter in the long run. He’s more a distraction than a device, he’s a symbol of all the bad decisions this movie makes.
The idea of the flood of memories of a whole city unleashed by a great event is swollen with promise — Gorbachev even shows up, with a speech he wrote for the film! — but everything that had fallen into place so perfectly on Wings was forced out of it for this follow-up. Wenders: “I wanted it to be different… I didn’t want it to be a sequel, so I did everything I could to work against that.” Fully scripted, and utilizing none of the same behind-the-camera talent, Faraway manages to be a sequel in the worst ways — the first hour feels like outtakes from the original, there are heavy-handed callbacks wasting time throughout — while forsaking Wings’ coherent grace for something of a caper film. It was mostly shot in the former East Germany, but its locations (including a flooded storage facility under an airport, the Niederfinow Boat Lift) are used less to evoke spirit than to house contrived set pieces. The director claims it as a favorite, but his offering is awkwardly staged, confusing, unlikely, and dull.
