Wings of Desire (1987)

The man sitting will jump
while the angel can only look on

This film started well, describing the psyche of the child and the sombre music promised something profound. Unfortunately I had trouble identifying the things that usually keep me interested in a movie. I like b/w films but most of this film didn't have many interesting frames, maybe at the beginning the areal view of  Berlin with its meandering apartment building blocks looked interesting, oh and also the tree in the mist . The script didn't seem to follow any story and only gave existentialist glimpses of all the fleeting characters. On many a scene I wished the focus had stayed with the character being drawn but the camera would just move on. Maybe that was the point of the story, that the protagonist angels were caught in a kind of limbo where they could not participate in a life they yearned for and were totally disengaged. They could not even save the life of one who commits suicide. This point could have been made more elegantly without the need for so many passing scenes. Wings of Desire could perhaps be retitled "The boring (and frustrating) life of angels". But this film is greatly admired so maybe I should not make light of it. I struggled with it because I wanted to like it given it's interesting topic. But it was a struggle, one my eyelids won on several occasions. Not because it was slow as some said but because it lacked that focus of interest. I add here that the first time I saw this film was shortly after it's release and again now, but for me it has only improved marginally with time. Ill give it another try in ten years.