Wings of Desire

When I try to describe this film, I keep fleeing from the word strange toward poetic — because there isn't much strange about it. If you accept its conceit at face value, everything that follows is fairly naturalistic and straightforward, especially given what else I've seen from Wenders. And the conceit is simple enough: angels, in a spiritual but perhaps not biblical sense, are all around us, invisible to everyone except children, tasked with guarding and observing a given patch of the world. In some ways this is Wenders' too-clumsy attempt at combining the two things he loves — the bizarre, met in an ironical register, and an earnest examination of the kinds of people that not just cinema but humanity tends to gloss over. It's a slower film than the rest of his oeuvre, but not by much; there's more propulsive action here than in, say, Perfect Days. Even so, I think it's at its strongest in its first two-thirds, when it is quiet and observational — when we are mostly left to breathe…