Wings of Desire is a love letter to life, to art and to Berlin. It is a love song and a hymn.

The film tells the story of two angels, Damiel and Cassiel as they move around the streets of Berlin. They observe its inhabitants but never interact with them. They feel their pain, hear their troubles, and sometimes try to help them. Damiel falls in love with a lonely trapeze artist Marion, he longs to experience life in the physical world. In the shape of a famous television detective - Peter Falk – Damiel discovers it is possible to exist in the physical world.

Textually and visually brilliant - the film has the unique ability to reach into the darkness only to pull out love and hope.  It is a sensory plunge into emotional waters. It opens up the idea of how we take certain things for granted like falling in love, drinking a good cup of coffee, and seeing the beautiful colours around us. Unfortunately, the angels are muted from the simplest to the most entangled pleasures of the human experience. To reflect this dichotomy the film goes between colour and black and white. The colour is the human experience and the black and white represents the muted tones from the angel’s perspective.

What is rather poignant is how only the children can see the angels, but not the grownups – except for one, a rather familiar face from American television, actor Peter Falk, who plays himself. It is undeniable that the pureness of children and their unburdened minds allow them to connect with the angels. The idea of angels in any narrative may bring you to the conclusion of a religious context but what we see here is a connection to humanity and to the world itself.

Our beautiful and lonely trapeze artist acts as a metaphor for the different worlds inhabited by the angels. A trapeze moves back and forth – pining for what they do not have yet being fully aware of the torture and tangles that the humans can endure. Do we want to be human and feel the world or do we want to be angels and help those in need…the trapeze swings back and forth like a pendulum.

Wings of Desire’s poetic narrative is a thing of beauty, the very idea of angels has a certain romanticism to it. If we take these elements and add them into the dark and dystopian backdrop of Berlin we begin to see the deep and meaningful link between literature, film, and place and how they can be connected yet paradoxical.

Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlinis) a 1987 film written by Wim Wenders, Peter Handke and Richard Reitinger, and directed by Wenders.