☆ ☆ ☆ ½
Wrong
Move (1975) – W. Wenders
The second film in Wim Wenders’ Road
Trilogy, after Alice in the Cities and before Kings of the Road, also starring
Rudiger Vogler. Here, he fashions
himself to be a writer but has nothing to say.
Venturing away from his home by train to Bonn, he picks up several
travelling companions, similarly aimless (including Hanna Schygulla as an
actress, and teen Nastassja Kinski as a circus performer). The script by Peter
Handke is artificial and didactic, focusing on alienation but also referring to
(or laying blame upon) Germany’s wartime past and the complicity (or active
engagement) by some in the atrocities. The
characters may allegorically symbolise different subsections of Germany’s
population (youth, older generation, etc.).
Naturalistic, this is not. Yet
somehow Wenders’ directorial choices, aided immensely by Robby Mueller’s
cinematography, keep things fresh.
Tracking shots abound and the countryside is green and the city dotted
with bright colours. Vogler and his
companions drift along and we note the things that happen but nothing seems to
affect him. Instead, he is alone and
unable to find purpose and meaning. The
other films in the trilogy seem less fully depressed.
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