The fourth film from Wim Wenders and the first part of his “road movie trilogy”.
“Not one image leaves you in peace, they all want something from you.”
This is one film I’d never watched but having seen it now, it’s shot straight to the top of my favourite Wim Wenders movies.
It’s also an interesting companion piece for The Goalkeepers Anxiety at the Penalty Kick as it features another existentially adrift protagonist (standing in for the director) and develops similar themes around cultural alienation.
Philip Winter is a German journalist who has been commissioned to write a piece about the soul of the American landscape. After travelling across the country he has become lost and disenchanted with the bland conformity of the consumer culture he encounters. Instead of writing, he takes endless Polaroids as a way to assure himself of his presence.
He decides to return home to Germany after a dressing down from his publisher and meets a German speaking woman and her daughter Alice. After spending the night with them when their flights from New York are delayed, the woman abandons them both leaving Alice in Philip’s care.
This unlikely turn of events is the setup for a beautifully played travelogue as the two return home first to Amsterdam and then to Wuppertal in search of Alice’s grandmother.
Alice’s memory of her life is sketchy and impressionistic and in this Philip comes to realise that it’s the filter of memory that he has lost in America. He stops taking pictures and slowly begins to write again.
Once again the cinematography by Wenders long term cameraman Robby Müller is just gorgeous and the black and white film renders even the most bland motel room interior like an Ansell Adams photograph.