“Alice in the Cities” (1974)
A bittersweet, picturesque snapshot of the world in motion, as well as a touching portrait of two very different people searching for their roots, “Alice in the Cities” is one of the most quietly, unassumingly powerful films of its time. The first in the director’s beloved “Road” trilogy, “Alice” is hopelessly in love with the tattered fabric of American life, even if the director’s worldview remains untethered to any one time or place in particular. In this way, “Alice” can be looked at as a sort of spiritual companion piece to the early films of Jim Jarmusch, who also made languid, minimalist pictures that examined the sublime poetry embedded in everyday life as well as the stark contrasts in the various cultures that make up the melting pot of our country. What story there is follows a shiftless photographer played by Rüdiger Volger, whose assignment is to find some sort of meaning in the dead-end margins of middle America. Along the way, he finds himself becoming the “guardian”, if that’s the right word for it, for a fearlessly independent little girl named Alice who has wandered out into the world in search of her long-estranged grandmother. What unfolds is alternately bemusing, beautiful, intimate and devastating – played, as always, in Wenders’s delicate minor key. There’s a superficial similarity to Peter Bogdanovich’s “Paper Moon” (a comparison Wenders himself was not entirely happy about) in the film’s depiction of a strained father-daughter relationship, but otherwise the films are as different as night and day. As a tender, textured story about broken relationships and the ongoing search for home, “Alice” is nothing short of a knockout.
“The Wrong Move” (1975)
The second part of Wenders’s road trilogy once again stars Rüdiger Vogler, the lead of “Alice In The Cities” plus Fassbinder regular Hanna Schygulla, and it also includes the first ever appearance of Nastassja Kinski, who was all of thirteen at that time. Much more aimless than his other films (read: plotless), “The Wrong Move” is at the very least a sort of manifesto in film form, setting out everything Wenders ever tried to achieve in cinema. It centers on a man in a type of existential crisis, who goes on a journey to Bonn in order to hopefully discover his voice as a writer, while along the way gathering a odd group of friends to travel with (like Kinski as the mute acrobat). Absentee fathers tend to be a theme in Wenders’s works and yes, there’s no patriarchal presence in the film, but the domineering mother who finally lets her son go and buys him the train ticket to Bonn is rather unique. When his fiction films haven’t worked, his soul-searching qualities have been accused of being incredibly pretentious and ponderous and “The Wrong Move” ostensibly fits that bill with its contemplative voice-over and long, gazing shots intended to find meaning in landscape. But the aimlessness of both the character and narrative are so genuine, the longing mood so real and the Robby Müller cinematography so evocative, that the lost and directionless dimensions of the film take on quietly poignant qualities. Admittedly, its status as an “essential” Wenders film is perhaps relative; its slow, wandering qualities are probably trying for all but Wenders-acolytes, but its also a key, early development film about the distances between people and lesser roads traveled.
“Kings of the Road” (1976)
A sense of loss infuses Wim Wenders’s 1976 masterpiece—but, as befitting its luxurious three-hour length, “Kings of the Road” is about many different kinds of loss. Sure, there are all the small-town East German movie theaters closing down and thus making Bruno Winter’s (Rüdiger Vogler) projectionist job increasingly obsolete, but there are also personal losses. Most notably, Bruno’s lack of a father figure in his life, and Robert Lander’s (Hanns Zischler) estrangement from his own father. And, with Wenders’s usual emphasis on details of encroaching Westernization—in a soundtrack filled with American tunes—”Kings of the Road” implies a broader loss of cultural identity after the devastation of World War II. With its many scenes of tenderness and humor, this road-trip epic is far from a downer. Nor is it simple-minded: Wenders isn’t shy about suggesting that self-pity may play as much of a role in Bruno’s and Robert’s predicaments as any external factors. In the end, at least one of these two characters comes to the everlasting realization that, as is always the case in life, “Everything must change.”
