There is hardly a German film that has been so praised for the beauty of its images as Wim Wenders’ “The Sky over Berlin” (1987). One can hardly get enough of the artfully composed camera work by Henri Alekan, who also photographed Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1946). He was certainly exactly the right man to stage this “modern cinematic fairy tale”. And this cinema fairy tale actually screams in every scene to be film poetry, showpiece and art cinema. Filmmaker Wenders, who had long since left for America and was once considered a model student of New German Cinema, couldn’t have gotten any smaller either.
Peter Handke, among others, contributed to the screenplay, which can also be heard in the numerous monologues in their often overused literarization. Perhaps it also explains the outrageous naivety with which Wenders staged the story of the angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander). The two celestial figures breathe new life into the people who seem to be stricken with terrible melancholy in divided Berlin – admittedly without being able to get in direct contact with them. As required by the laws of screen dramaturgy and the mythical subtext gently brought into play, the messenger of God falls in love with a trapeze artist and decides to give up his immortality in favor of his beloved.
The film doesn’t tell more about love than a photo novel
Of course, this is also Hollywood stuff, which is why the dream factory could not refrain from later exchanging the sky over Berlin for the sky over Los Angeles (“City of Angels”, 1998, even before Meg Ryan disappeared into obscurity and Nicolas Cage trash icon degenerated). But above all it is a story that cannot be had without kitsch and silly gossip. This ‘Love Story’ presents itself as intellectual, but despite everything it uses the canonical means of the soap opera and gives it a clairvoyant touch by means of poems that are summoned up and a leap into the protagonists’ world of thought. We don’t really learn any more about love than in a photo novel, apart from the realization that Nick Cave has always written the right soundtrack for the great tragedies of body and soul.
For more than two hours, the camera hovers around the protagonists as if dizzy, refined sound collages solidify the art cinema character of the elevated drama, which pretends to the viewer a reflection on transience, longing and melancholy and does not come to any conclusion that is more than a feast for the eyes of the shimmering black and white compositions.
Peter Falk is allowed to play Peter Falk. Of course “with a wink”. A metareflexive volte that strangely disrupts the flow of the otherwise highly artificial plot. Perhaps many moviegoers missed it because at the time they equated the actor with Columbo and wondered why he wasn’t addressed by his iconic name.
“The sky over Berlin” is apolitical and infantile cinema
And what does the viewer learn about Berlin, this historically furrowed city at the edge of the universe? Nothing at all. Not even the wall is real, it had to be rebuilt because it was forbidden to film it. Andrzej Zulawski, the Polish eccentric among Eastern European film virtuosos, had presented a more subtle commentary on the situation in this city in a state of emergency with his psycho orgy “Possession” (1981). Instead of bramar-based angelic creatures, there was a mad Isabelle Adjani to marvel at, who, no joke, was doing it with an octopus.
Rudolf Scharping, who certainly did not become famous because of his extraordinary understanding of art, once judged that the story of “Himmel über Berlin” was suitable as a “parable of the permeability of walls and borders”. The opposite is the case: This canvas painting, whose equivalent is the realistic, but at the same time hyper-cheesy painted putti by William-Adolphe Bougereau, is thoroughly apolitical and has come to a close in its conception of love and lust. Even if the aesthetic icing doesn’t fail to have an effect, the message of this “melancholy blues” remains infantile – and wants to be. Jean Cocteau would hardly have liked the film.
Of course, “Der Himmel über Berlin” won so many gold statues from the German Film Prize and the European Film Prize to the award for best director at the Cannes Film Festival that even in its day it was almost impossible to say what was actually for the cinematically trained visible to the eye: this cinematographic dream-tissue, stuffed after “Paris, Texas” (1984) with symbols of European art and film history and quotations from the Bible, is the product of a romantic who, instead of telling a story (which would have an end, an awakening from the dream) prefers to meditate aimlessly on philosophical problems in “Reader’s Digest” format to hide the narrative emptiness of his story.