Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, glide through the streets of Berlin, observing the bustling population, providing invisible rays of hope to the distressed but never interacting with them. When Damiel falls in love with lonely trapeze artist Marion, the angel longs to experience life in the physical world, and finds — with some words of wisdom from actor Peter Falk — that it might be possible for him to take human form.
Wings of Desire is one of cinema's most singular achievements — Wim Wenders and Peter Handke crafted something genuinely unlike anything else, a meditation on mortality, longing, and the weight of human experience rendered in luminous black-and-white cinematography by Henri Alekan. The angels drifting through Berlin overhearing interior monologues is both conceptually audacious and executed with extraordinary delicacy. Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander give performances of rare, quiet intensity, and Peter Falk's self-aware cameo is inspired. Novelty earns a 4 not just for the concept but for the utterly distinctive tone — melancholic, poetic, celebratory all at once. The ending, while emotionally satisfying, softens somewhat into a more conventional romantic resolution and the final monologue, while beautiful in isolation, slightly deflates the film's earlier transcendent ambiguity.