Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (48 page)

APRIL 21, 1978

erner Herzog has subtitled Stroszek as "a ballad," and so it is: it's like one of those bluegrass nonsense ballads in which impossible adventures are described in every verse, and the chorus reminds us that life gets teedjus, don't it? But because Herzog has one of the most original imaginations of anyone now making movies, Stroszek is a haunting and hilarious ballad at the same time, an almost unbelievable mixture of lunacy, comedy, tragedy, and the simply human.

Consider. He gives us three main characters who are best friends, despite the fact that they're improbable as people and impossible as friends. There's Stroszek himself, just released from prison in Germany. He's a simple soul who plays the piano and the accordion and never quite understands why people behave as they do. There's Eva, a dim but pleasant Berlin prostitute. And there's old Sheitz, a goofy soul in his seventies who has been invited to live with his nephew in upstate Wisconsin.

This mixture is further complicated by the fact that Stroszek is played by Bruno S., the same actor Herzog used in Kaspar Hauser. Bruno S. is a mental patient, described by Herzog as schizophrenic, and it's a good question whether he's "acting" in this movie or simply exercising a crafty survival instinct. No matter: he comes across as saintly, sensitive, and very strange.

The three friends meet when Eva's two pimps beat her up and throw her out. She comes to live with Stroszek. The pimps (evil hoods right out of a Fassbinder gangster movie) later visit Stroszek and Eva and beat them both up, leaving Stroszek kneeling on his beloved piano with a school bell balanced on his derriere.

It is clearly time to leave Berlin, and old Scheitz has the answer: visit his relatives in America. The nephew lives on a Wisconsin farm in an incredibly barren landscape, but to the Germans it's the American Dream. They buy an enormous mobile home, seventy feet long and fully furnished, and install a color TV in it. Eva gets a job as a waitress, and turns some tricks on the side at the truck stop. Stroszek works as a mechanic, sort of. Old Scheitz wanders about testing the "animal magnetism" of fence posts.

The Wisconsin scenes are among the weirdest I've ever seen in a movie: notice, for example, the visit Stroszek and Eva get from that supercilious little twerp from the bank, who wants to repossess their TV set and who never seems to understand that nothing he says is understood. Or notice the brisk precision with which an auctioneer disposes of the mobile home, which is then carted away, all seventy feet of it, leaving the bewildered Stroszek looking at the empty landscape it has left behind.

Stroszek gets most hypnotically bizarre as it goes along, because we understand more of the assumptions of the movie. One of them is possibly that Kaspar Hauser might have become Stroszek, had he lived for another century and studied diligently. (Hauser, you might remember, was the "wild child" kept imprisoned in the dark for nineteen years, never taught to speak, and then dumped in a village square.)

The film's closing scenes are wonderfully funny and sad, at once. Stroszek and Scheitz rob a barber shop, and then Stroszek buys a frozen turkey, and then there is an amusement park with a chicken that will not stop dancing (and a policeman reporting "The dancing chicken won't stop"), and a wrecker driving in a circle with no one at the wheel, and an Indian chief looking on impassively, and somehow Herzog has made a statement about America here that is as loony and utterly original as any ever made.

NOVEMBER 16, 1979

ainer Werner Fassbinder has been working his way toward this film for years, ever since he began his astonishingly prodigious output with his first awkward but powerful films in 1969. His films are always about sex, money, and death, and his method is often to explore those three subjects through spectacularly incompatible couples (an elderly cleaning woman and a young black worker, ajames Dean look-alike and a thirteenyear-old girl, a rich gay-about-town and a simple-minded young sweepstakes winner). Whatever his pairings and his cheerfully ironic conclusions, though, there is always another subject lurking in the background of his approximately thirty-three (!) features. He gives us what he sees as the rise and second fall of West Germany in the three postwar decades considered in the context of the overwhelming American influence on his country.

With the masterful epic The Marriage of Maria Braun, he makes his clearest and most cynical statement of the theme, and at the same time gives us a movie dripping with period detail, with the costumes and decor he is famous for, with the elegant decadence his characters will sell their souls for in a late-194os economy without chic retail goods.

Fassbinder's film begins with a Germany torn by war and ends with a gas explosion and a soccer game. His ending may seem arbitrary to some, but in the context of West German society in the 19706 it may only be good reporting. His central character, Maria Braun, is played with great style and power by Hanna Schygulla, and Maria's odyssey from the war years to the consumer years provides the film's framework.

The film opens as Maria marries a young soldier, who then goes off to battle and presumably is killed. It follows her during a long period of mourning, which is punctuated by a little amateur hooking (of which her mother tacitly approves) and then by a tender and very carefully observed liaison with a large, strong, gentle black American soldier whom she really likes-we guess.

The soldier's accidental death and her husband's return are weathered by Maria with rather disturbing aplomb, but then we begin to see that Maria's ability to feel has been atrophied by the war, and her ability to be surprised has withered away. If war makes any plans absolutely meaningless, then why should one waste time analyzing coincidences?

Fassbinder has some rather bitter fun with what happens in the aftermath of the soldier's death (the love-struck, or perhaps just shell-shocked, husband voluntarily goes to prison, and Maria rises quickly in a multinational corporation). The movie is more realistic in its treatment of characters than Fassbinder sometimes is, but the events are as arbitrary as ever (and why not-events only have the meanings we assign to them, anyway).

The mini-apocalypse at the end is a perfect conclusion (an ending with "meaning" would have been obscene for this film), and then I think we are left, if we want it, with the sum of what Fassbinder has to say about the rebuilding of Germany: we got the stores opened again, but we don't know much about the customers yet.

1988

n notes that he wrote after directing Wings of Desire, Wim Wenders reflected that it would be terrible to be an angel: "To live for an eternity and to be present all the time. To live with the essence of things-not to be able to raise a cup of coffee and drink it, or really touch somebody." In his film, this dilemma becomes the everyday reality of two angels, who move through Berlin observing people, listening, reflecting, caring. They can see and hear, but are cut off from the senses of touch, taste, and smell. Human life appears to them as if it were a movie.

The angels look like two ordinary men, with weary and kind faces. They can move through the air free of gravity, but in all other respects they appear to the camera to be just as present as the human characters in a scene. Their role is a little unclear. They watch. They listen. Sometimes, when they are moved by the plight of a human they care about, they are able to stand close to that person and somehow exude a sense of caring or love, which seems to be vaguely perceived by the human, to whom it can provide a moment of hope or release.

The angel we are most concerned with in the film is Damiel, played by Bruno Ganz, that everyman of German actors whose face is expressive because it is so lived-in, so tired. He moves slowly through the city, hearing snatches of conversation, seeing moments of lives, keenly aware of his existence as a perpetual outsider. One day he comes across Marion (Solveig Dommartin), a trapeze artist, and is moved by her sadness. He helps her in the ways that he can, but eventually he realizes that he does not want to end her suffering so much as to share it.

That is the problem with being an angel. He can live forever, but in a sense, he can never live. To an angel, a being who exists in eternity, human lives must seem to be over in a brief flash of time, in a wink of history, and yet during our brief span, at least humans are really alive-to grow, to learn, to love, to suffer, to drink a cup of coffee, while an angel can only imagine the warmth of the cup, the aroma of the coffee, the taste, the feel.

Damiel determines to renounce immortality and accept human life with all its transience and pain. And in that act of renunciation, he makes one of the most poignant and romantic of gestures. He is accepting the limitations not only of his loved one, but of life itself.

Wings of Desire was directed by Wenders (whose credits include Paris, Texas and The American Friend), and cowritten by Wenders and Peter Handke, the German novelist who also wrote and directed The Left-Handed Woman. They are not interested in making some kind of softhearted, sentimental Hollywood story in which harps play and everybody feels good afterward.

Their film is set in divided Berlin, most insubstantial of cities because its future always seems deferred. Most of the film is shot in black and white, the correct medium for this story, because color would be too realistic to reflect the tone of their fable. Many of the best moments in the film have no particular dramatic purpose, but are concerned only with showing us what it is like to be forever an observer. Ganz walks quietly across empty bridges. He looks into vacant windows. He sits in a library and watches people as they read. He is there, and he is not there. The sterility of his existence almost makes us understand the choice of Lucifer in renouncing heaven in order to be plunged into hell, where at least he could suffer, and therefore, feel.