The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 20

20 The Sydney Morning Herald I A Thursday, October 13, 1988 REVIEWS PAUL BYRNES "Ss rSOi SKEfe- f-lfif' Trrfcfi 1'? ill i dedicated to three film-making "angels" Francois Truffaut, Yasujiro Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky three masters of the art, whose work has inspired this director.) It's not just the depth of emotion which makes the film so good; it's also the depth of ideas and the formal control that Wenders has. The movie is much more cryptic than Paris. Texas, but it's much freer too in the way it uses film. It drifts in and out of monotone and colour footage to denote emotional shifts; it uses archival film of the bombed-out city to mix the past and the present; it has a textured, densely layered soundtrack that's start-lingly effective, and a series of hypnotic monologues written by Peter Handke and spoken as narration which give the film the feel of lyric poetry. Throughout, Wenders's tone is serious, but there is also an unforced, smiling quality to it that defies the gravity, so to speak.

Wenders is one of the most exciting and gifted film-makers now working, because he is adventurous in style and thoroughly human in nature. He believes in the power of movies, the way that great film-makers always do, and in the power of the people who pay to see them. The angels are -his way of bridging that divide. After the sad separation at the end of Paris. Texas, when Harry Dean Stanton drove off into the twilight leaving behind the woman and child he loved.

Wings of Desire is a return to optimism, a cry of hope amidst the ruins of a city that symbolises much of 20th-century history. The film effects a reconciliation. Wenders's own return to Germany seems to parallel the passage of the angel Damiel (Bruno Ganz), who decides to become human, for the love of the trapeze artist, Marion (played by Solveig Dommartin, the director's own companion for the last four years). Damiel and all the other angels we see in the streets and trains and apartment blocks of Berlin can see the pain of people's lives and hear their thoughts, but cannot do much for them. Damiel's return to earth is a choice for life, for human existence, whatever it may bring.

And in this director's hands, that idea isn't so much cloying or sentimental as rejuvenating. His angels aren't religious at all. They're more like metaphors for people who have retained the innocence and goodness of a child which is why children can see them. (The film is Each of these scenes and so many others in Wings of Desire has a kind of transfixing, magical quality. You don't know exactly what they mean yet, but they are so beautiful that it doesn't really matter.

The movie is shot mostly in a kind of luminous, nostalgic black and white that's reminiscent of the way movies used to look. That seems intentional, because Wim Wenders persuaded the renowned Henri Alekan, now nearly 80, to come out of retirement for this film. Alekan shot Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast back in 1943 and he is employed here not just for his skill, but, one suspects, for the cinematic history he represents. History is everywhere in Wings of Desire. This is the first film that he has made in his native Germany for some time, after a period of wandering and the one that won him the best director prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival.

In the notes to the film Wenders talks about Berlin being more a site than a city. "No other city is to such an extent a symbol, a place of survival. Berlin is as divided as are our world, our epoch, as are man and woman, young and old, rich and poor, as are every single one of our experiences." YRNS3 OF DESIRE Directed by Wim Wenders Written by Wenders and Peter Handke Rated PG Dendy Onema ANGEL in ponytail and ri dark overcoat stands Jfc atop an old building in Berlin, gazing down, his tmmi w- transparent wings just visible for an instant, before they fade. In the street below a child looks up and wonders if what he sees is what he sees. Another angel wanders unseen down the corridor of a plane flying into the city, passing a ruminating Peter Falk, who's come to do a movie.

"Get a good costume, that's half the battle," Falk mumbles to himself, looking crumpled and benevolent, as he always does. In the Circus Alekan, somewhere in the city, a young trapeze artist is practising, swinging back and forth with fake wings on her back, her trainer below barking: "Don't dangle. Fly. You're an angel," not knowing that there is one watching. Bruno Ganz (left) and Otto Sander angels chatting in a BMW.

OPENINGS umeiM Saving Christ from the dross THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST Directed by Martin Scorsese Written by Paul Schrader Rated George Centre and suburbs WW LL A letter written in 1951, before the novel was published, Nikos Kazantzakis spoke of his inten I Because Series offers Terrific seats to The Aust ralian Opera A great chance to get the seats you want THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE: Maggie Smith in great form as an Irish spinster struggling with Bob Hoskias aad the bottle. Pitt Centre, Mostnao. HAIRSPRAY: John Wafers satirises both the teen and the message movie in this terrific recreation of dance-crazy Baltimore in 1962. Hoyts City and suburbs. BINGO BRIDESMAIDS AND BRACES: Third of Gillian Armstrong's documentaries about three working-class Adelaide women, first interviewed in 1975.

Intimate, fanny and insightful. Chauvel. ANDREI ROUBLEV: Andrei Tar-kovsky's epic 1966 film about a 15th century Russian icon painter, in Cinemascope, with 40-imnnte cut restored. Lyrical and awe-inspiring. The Mandolin.

A HANDFUL OF DUST: Evelyn Waugh's melancholy novel about the demise of a marriage is faithfully aad elegantly filmed by Charles (Brides-head) Sturridge. Alec Goinaess does a fine cameo. Pitt Centre, Mosmaa and Double Bay. CLOCKWORK ORANGE: Reissue of Stanley Kubrick's classic 1971 movie about incipient authoritarianism and an ultra-violent thug, played by Malcolm McDowell. Provocative then and now.

Village Cinema dry and suburbs. BIG BUSINESS: Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin make a good pair ia this piece of likable frippery about mixed-up twins in Manbattaa. GU Centre and suburbs. THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE: John Frankenheimer's superb 1962 political thriller-cam-satire hasn't been seen for 15 years. Frank Sinatra in a landmark movie.

Pitt Centre and Academy Twin. BLOWPIPES AND BULLDOZERS: Un previewed. Australian documentary filmed covertly in Sarawak, about the destruction of a way of life for the Penan people. Mandolin. BOULEVARD OF BROKEN DREAMS: Unpreviewed.

John Waters won an AFI award this week for his performance as a writer trying to patch up his family life in Melbourne. Hoyts City and suburbs. DOMINICK AND EUGENE: Slack, sentimental story of twin brothers in Pittsburgh, with Tom Hulce well below his best. Pitt Centre and Double Bay. THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST: Martin Scorsese's retelling of the Christ story is passionate and moving, rather than blasphemous.

Suitable for believers and non-believers alike. George Centre and suburbs. PING PONG: Chinese woman lawyer executes a will for a London Chinese family. Average. Valhalla.

KUBRICK FESTIVAL: Most of Stanley's big movies, plus a few rarities. Valhalla. WINGS OF DESIRE: Wim Wenders in daring, magical form with a tale of angels on the streets of Berlin. Won best direction prize at Cannes last year. Dendy.

RED HEAT: Unpreviewed. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi in an action comedy, partly filmed in Moscow. Village Cinema City and suburbs. WORTH SEEING MIDNIGHT RUN: Funny, fast buddy movie, made more solid by the pairing of Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. GU Centre and suburbs.

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place of dust and poverty, political suppression and abrupt violence. The film flows with blood and debased humanity. You feel the place needs a Saviour and can believe that people would cling to one. The strength of this realism sometimes clashes with the surreal, fantastic events in the story of Christ The miracles the water into wine at Cana, the raising of Lazarus are treated literally, even nonchalantly, and that can be disconcerting. But the climax of the novel, the crucifixion and the extended hallucination that follows, in which Christ dreams of the ordinary life he might have had with marriage to Mary Magdalene (Barbara Hershey), sex, adultery, children and old age achieves an epic intensity.

Scorsese recreates the passion of the writing, the roiling, questioning force of it, and the film is moving and powerful, the way the story of Jesus Christ should be. Dominick deals a dud DOMINICK AND EUGENE Directed by Robert M. Young Written by Alvin Sargent and Corey Blechman Rated Pitt Centre, and Double Bay THE director of Dominick and Eugene. Robert M. Young, says a revealing thing in the notes to the film: "Pathos is easy to contrive but it's the pornography of feelings." Clearly, then, he didn't intend to make a pathetic movie, but it sure turned out that way.

And he's right, it does debase the film's emotions. Dominick and Eugene drips with pathos. Tears are required by the end of the first reel. They got yawns instead from me. It's the story of twin brothers, one smart, the other slow.

Eugene (Ray Liotta) is a final-year medical student, and Dominick (Tom hauls garbage. They share a dingy apartment in the down-at-heel Italian section of Pittsburgh, and Dominick's wages pay for Eugene's tuition (if you can believe that). The relationship is close. Dominick is gullible and gentle, the result of a knock on the head as a child. His retardation is mild but enough to make Eugene grow fiercely protective, beating up anyone who takes advantage of that innocence.

This mutual dependency is disrupted when Eugene meets a nice girl (Jamie Lee Curtis), and finds out that he has won a scholarship to Stanford University. Who will take care of Dominick? The script is sentimental to start with, cloying rather than gentle, but it's made worse by the casting of Tom Hulce. He plays Dominick as if he were a clumsy puppy, slack-chinned and dopey, with childish, breathy speech patterns. It's a mannered; gesticular performance, the kind that gives method acting a bad name. He is trying to clobber the role, rather than get inside it, but it's the most important one in the movie.

A different actor might have helped, but not enough to make it worthwhile. It's well-intentioned, but that doesn't stop it being a dud. IcdTcD at the museum, the priceless fi rsf i mnressinn nf An Qtra 1 1 EMU tions in writing The Last Temptation of Christ. "It isn't a simple 'Life of Christ'. It is a laborious, sacred, creative endeavour to reincarnate the essence of Christ, setting aside the dross the falsehoods and pettiness which all the churches and all the cassocked representatives of Christianity have heaped upon his figure, thereby distorting it." No wonder then that the book was placed on the Papal Index when it was published a few years later.

In response, Kazantzakis telegraphed the Commission on the Index: "Ad tuum, domine, tribunal appello" thy court I appeal, The author's words are no less resonant now that the film is among us. Martin Scorsese's movie is also a "laborious, sacred and creative" attempt to reincarnate Christ for a modern audience. Most of the opposition to it comes from the defenders of orthodoxy though their voices are hardly united in opposition. (I know of at least one church in Sydney which is selling copies of the book to parishioners, for instance.) The film, like the book, is about a man's struggle to attain unity with God, to reconcile the spirit and the flesh. Scorsese's Christ is probably the most troubled ever put on the screen.

He rebels against God, he fears the knowledge of his own divinity and he's chronically unsure of how a Saviour should act, or even if he is the Saviour. Judas (Harvey Keitel), as a Jewish revolutionary, urges the sword to drive out the Romans; John the Baptist (Andre Gregory) offers the axe, to fell the rotten tree of human corruption, but Jesus (Willem Dafoe) suspects that love is the only real weapon against Satan. This vacillating figure is bound to upset people who cherish the notion of a strong, resolute Christ That's the way most movies have shown him, but it's hardly heretical to try to tackle the real mystery, the question of "dual of how man and God could co-exist in the same character. That's what The Last Temptation is all about and that's what distinguishes it as a movie. Scorsese's film is an act of courage, not of blasphemy.

It has faults, but dishonest intentions aren't among them. The problems come from the book, and Paul Schrader's script didn't have much chance to solve them. Kazantzakis writes of Christ with a feverish, poetic passion. His characters speak in exalted, intense phrases, straight from the author's heart, but they're often impossible for an actor to say. On the page, they may live, but on film they can, and do, die.

In the hands of a lesser director, this would have mattered more, but Scorsese's power over the image never fails him, if the words sometimes do. Shooting in Morocco on a small budget, he has created the most credible Middle Eastern movie about Christ that I have ever seen, set in a Subscriptions to The Australian Opera must close Friday 14 October. ACT NOW to secure CIRCLE Joseph Banks, Sydney Parkinson and others recorded with awe their first impressions of a strange land. I your seats for this spectacular series. Now, 200 years later, see those impressions for the first time.

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Address PCode. I FIRST IMPRESSIONS YES Eve: Payment by cheque Cheque received I om a member of THE AUSTRALIAN OPERA GUILD they were "fairly well-informed" about the arts. Nearly two-thirds of respondents also disagreed that the arts "should be made to survive on ticket sales This underlined earlier Australia Council findings that most people believed the level of arts subsidy should be lifted. The survey revealed, however, that a quarter of people believed that "the arts often harm our society by being too critical of our way of life. Slightly more from Melbourne and the coaatry agreed with this than do those lhiag ia Sydney.

MARTIN PORTUS Tel. Day BOX OFFICE I I I I NO THE arts top the list of activities that Australians want to see more of on television, according to an Australia Council survey released this week. Of those interviewed, 53 per cent wanted more arts coverage on TV, well ahead of those wanting more current affairs (25 per cent), news (9 per cent) or sport (8 per cent). Of the 1,200 interviewed last year, more than 90 per cent also believed that the success of Australian artists gave us a sense of national pride. Bat far fewer Australians believed Booking prepared by BOX OFFICE USE ST CI LS AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM 22ND SEPTEMBER 20TH NOVEMBER 1988 CHSUNCO Category.

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