Der Himmel über Berlin
This is pure unfiltered euro arthouse, it’s the uncut shit. I wouldn’t get half of it, even if I understood German. And the first-name only dedication to Yasujirō Ozu, François Truffaut, and Andrei Tarkovsky, what a blowhard.
It’s pretty uplifting, even though it is set in Berlin with the massive Wall, still ruined decades after the war. There’s only internal struggles, besides a small car crash, and the dude that jumps off the building. But it’s not dark and gloomy like Lethal Weapon.
The basic plot, to my некультурный mind, is about a pair of angels. Our protagonist is bored of being outside time, always watching but unable to touch, feel, affect the world. The other one is fine with being a supernatural demigod. Their occupation is a much more wholesome version of The Adjustment Bureau, since they only observe, they don’t adjust anything.
Our protagonist watches a depressed circus trapeze artist, as she loses her job and has to go back being a maid somewhere. She is a French woman in booming Berlin, and likes to go to obscure concerts at the Academie, some Australian dudes and freaking Nick Cave.
The protagonist also stalks another protagonist, Peter Falk doing a bit part in some film about Nazis, he is not even seen acting! Besides children, only Peter Falk can see the angels, since he was himself an angel at some point!
Angel Central is a massive public library, where an old man visits very often, to look at a big book of pictures. That is interspersed with World War II footage. I assumed he’s a guy from Bismarck’s time or something, waxing lyrical about war and stuff, but he’s actually Homer himself, of The Odyssey, even though the actor is from Casablanca.
This was written by Peter Handke, the Nobel winner, but it’s a stream of consciousness bonanza, there’s barely any plot.
I’m almost sure the American remake (City of Angels) cut out 90% of the script and made the angel join the world of the living much sooner, so he can stalk the circus trapeze artist. Here it takes more than one hour for the colour to show up. Even funnier would be having Peter Falk reprise his role.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.