Nice thing about the five-hour movie being spread across two discs is it’s an easy way to break it up across two evenings. The down side is my brain played the title U2 song on a loop for the 22 hours between discs. This began Wenders’ U2 era – they also did songs for Faraway, So Close and Beyond the Clouds and The End of Violence, and Bono wrote and produced the awful Million Dollar Hotel, beginning a drought during which WW couldn’t make a decent fiction film until (here’s hoping) 2023.
Sam Neill is our narrator writing a book about what happened after Claire left him. I thought there’d be some play between the real versions of events and the way he writes them, but no, he’s just following the story as we are and typing it up neatly so we don’t get lost. Claire is Solveig Dommartin, star of the two angel movies and Claire Denis’s No Fear, No Die. She takes an abandoned road to avoid a traffic jam and crashes into a couple of thieves with bags full of money, beginning the road movie tradition of accumulating a cast of friendly characters. Next she’ll add tech fugitive William Hurt and original road man Rudiger Vogler as a bounty hunter. In various configurations they travel to Lisbon, Berlin, China, Japan, USA. Across the shabby chaotic cities of nuclear crisis 1999, WW nailed how annoying computer voices and graphics would be in our future.
It’s all very plotty, not a loose hangout piece like the earlier films with Vogler. That’s not a problem, just a different sort of thing, but when they settle down in Australia for part two, it becomes a problem. Hurt (“Trevor”) and Claire gerry their way through the desert clutching the airplane door she’s been handcuffed to, soundtracked by Peter Gabriel. I imagine Rabbit Proof Fence was a reference to this – also imagine that their character names are a shout-out to Stagecoach star Claire Trevor. When they arrive at Hurt’s family tech lab, the brisk travel plot abruptly stops and we get bogged down in the plot of transmitting brainwave images to Hurt’s blind mom Jeanne Moreau. Dad Max von Sydow (my second 1980s von Sydow this month) changes the focus of his project to dream capture, alienating the locals and the viewers. Neill keeps writing as Hurt and Claire lose their sense of waking reality and the movie turns to drug addiction metaphors (she goes through withdrawal when her dream-viewer runs out of battery). The gang starts to fall away and it all peters out, ending with a postscript of Claire taking a zoom call in space. Spotted in the credits: Michael Almereyda, Paulo Branco, Chen Kaige.
The Australia half is almost redeemed by this band:
Chico can dig it:
From the extras: Almereyda tried to write a draft. Wenders very interested in creating and distorting the HD images, a prototype technology at the time, and talks about being a music collector. “That was another reason why the movie had to be so long” – he wrote all his fave musicians asking them to write a futuristic song, thinking most would say no, then ended up with a ton of songs. He wanted an Elvis song he couldn’t have, so “I don’t know how it happened but” David Lynch produced a cover version.