557 - Wrong Move, Germany, 1975. Dir. Wim Wenders.
Wilhelm wants to be a writer.
He is not a writer. He wants to be one.
He has the support of his mother. She is cashing in her chips, selling what she has, giving him the money, and sending him off on a train. She believes in him and wants him to succeed. She thickens his skin against the type of people who will tell him that a "useful" profession, such as a doctor, is preferable. Those kind of people live limited lives. They wake up and do what they are supposed to and have no creativity or freedom or experience. A writer, however, can travel and see things and write about them. A writer can have experience.
Wilhelm's mother looks forward to all the letters Wilhelm will be writing to him. As he boards the train for Bonn, we are not certain he will write her any. He reveals to us that he does not like people, and he finds that to be a handicap for a writer. As the movie progresses, we may begin to agree with him.
Wilhelm sits in a compartment at first alone. He sees blood on the seat across from him. Maybe someone's nose is bleeding. He glances diagonally across. A girl sits there, with strange, mysterious eyes. She looks at him quietly, without flinching, practically without blinking, a steady, mysterious stare. The man returns and sits across from Wilhelm. His nose is still bleeding. The girl joins the man, and Wilhelm realizes they are together. When the conductor comes to collect the ticket, he states that they are a couple tickets short, and Wilhelm passively accedes to cover the cost for them.
The girl continues to stare at Wilhelm, without speaking, and we sense that she is fond of him. He, however, looks out the window and stares at a woman in a parallel train. He had seen her when he was boarding, and she too looked at him with that kind of look. Wilhelm seems to have a way of attracting women's gazes. If only he liked people.
In Woody Allen's film Stardust Memories (1980), protagonist Sandy Bates looks out the train window and sees a Pretty Girl looking out the window of the parallel train. His train is filled with down-and-outers, dull, listless and without purpose. Her train is filled with fabulous and beautiful people, who are going somewhere wonderful and having a great time doing it. Sandy looks out the window with longing as she, a young Sharon Stone, blows him a kiss through her window pane, and he feels that he has made the wrong decision, boarded the wrong train, and he does not have enough time to change positions. The trains have already started moving. His, going one way. Hers, going the other. A fork in the road of life where he wishes he could take the other one in the very moment that he is taking this one. Instant sadness. Immediate regret.
Wilhelm will also make the wrong move, or so the movie's title predicts. But not in the way Sandy does. In Wenders' film, made seven years before Allen's, the train carrying the Pretty Girl, named Therese Farner, is going in the same direction as Wilhelm's train. And she has time to lower her window and look at him and smile.
We do not know if Woody Allen is alluding to Wim Wenders when he stages his scene in Stardust Memories, though we would not be surprised. But we do sense that both directors are paying homage to the master Federico Fellini, with his train scene in 8½.
Wilhelm stares at Therese as the mysterious girl stares at him. We recognize Therese immediately. We have just spent the last couple weeks with her, in Werner Rainer Fassbinder's epic Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), and several films before in other Fassbinder films. It is none other than Hannah Schygulla, Fassbinder's muse. This is the first film we have seen her in made by a different director. She is radiant as always, and she seems to be as interested in Wilhelm as he is in her.
Laertes! That is a signal. Laertes was an Argonaut in Greek mythology, one of Jason's men, and the father of Odysseus himself, who was also known as Ulysses, and for whom Homer's The Odyssey was named. The other Laertes was Ophelia's brother in Hamlet, the son of Polonius, and the man who kills Hamlet at the end of the play while incriminating Claudius for the murder of Hamlet's father.
Why did Wenders come up with such a grand name for this character, and what was he saying with it? Well, it turns out that his screenwriter, Peter Handke, himself an Austrian novelist who would write or co-write several of Wenders' sceenplays (The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty Kick (1970), Wings of Desire (1987), and The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez (2016)), was actually adapting a novel by none other than Goethe himself--himself one of the greatest authors in the history of world literature.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795-6) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The writer of the German epic. Faust (1806, 1832). (The antagonist of Faust was Mephistopheles. If you know The Police song "Wrapped Around Your Finger," then you have heard the literary writings ("Mephistopheles is not your name / I know what you're up to just the same") of an English teacher named Gordon Sumner, who became a rock star under the name Sting.)
Goethe, who worked on Faust for 60 years, took 25 years to write Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. In the novel Wilhelm joins a theater group and plays the role of Hamlet in their production of Hamlet. Thus, there is your Laertes. The novel focuses on the development or early education of Wilhelm and popularized a style of novel called the Bildungsroman. The German word bildung means "education." The word roman means "novel." It is a novel of the education or development of a young man. Some prominent Bildungsromans include Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), Voltaire's Candide (1759), Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759), Rousseau's Emile (1763), Jane Austen's Emma (1815), Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847), Charles Dickens' David Copperfield (1850) and Great Expectations (1861), Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1869), Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1884), Henry James' What Maisie Knew (1897), and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), among many others. When I was working on my Masters degree in Literature, we were expected to know and to have read all of them.
Goethe's novel was cited by some German critics as one of the greatest novels ever written. So our Wilhelm is rooted in that Wilhelm.
Interestingly, though, it does not feel like it. It feels like a typical Wenders road-trip art film of the 1970s. As if Wenders and his actors could have taken a loose outline of a script and improvised the meat onto it.
The girl Mignon might also be named for a literary archetype well known in Germany. German artist Wilhelm von Schadow painted a painting entitled Mignon (1828), about a girl who seemed to fit the German fairy tale tradition of the angelic child who faces an early death. Composer Robert Schumann then wrote the Requiem for Mignon, Op. 98b, which premiered in November of 1950. If anything, our Mignon fits the bill of the angelic child. She never speaks in the film, and she always looks with those large, mysterious eyes. You might not recognize her while watching it. In the end credits you will see her listed as Nastassja Nakszynski, and discover that she is indeed the one and only Nastassja Kinski, our girl from Tess (1979) and Paris, Texas (1984), here in her first-ever film performance.
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Wilhelm will pick up fellow travelers in his meandering, as they develop into a roving bohemian artist commune. Wilhelm, the aspiring writer. Laertes, the musician. Mignon, the street performer. Therese, the actress. Bernhard, the poet. And the unnamed Industrialist.
Their cobbled family is loosely joined and fragile, and it will not last.
Whereas our last film, Wenders' Alice in the Cities (1974), contained little dialogue and many images, with human action taking place in the silences between people, this film contains much talking, political and aesthetic philosophizing, from the elder Laertes' history in the Nazi party to Wilhelm's and Bernhard's thoughts on what it takes to be a novelist or poet, to Therese's thoughts on acting and relationships and Wilhelm's personality and behavior, to the industrialist's thoughts on loneliness and death, to everyone's dreams, real or imagined or invented.
Wilhelm observes that for a writer observation is more important than inspiration. Why wait to be inspired? Observe the world around you and write what you see. But then Wilhelm must confess to Therese when she calls him out that he indeed observes less than the average person and less than anyone in their group.
His irascibility gets the best of him, and he cannot form lasting relationships with anyone. Not now. Not yet.
He admits to us that his claims of putting his work over his relationships is really a pretext--he uses the word pretext twice in a row--and that he was really showing off, wanting the others, and Therese in particular, to believe that he was a writer when he does not yet have the confidence that he is.
By the end of the film, as Wilhelm stands on the Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany, neither he nor we have that confidence.
The film is an independent art house film from a New German Cinema director. His plot does not follow any logic that a viewer might ascribe to it. Rather, it turns against expectations at each fork. And its surprising turns suggest a kind of precursor to magical realism softly at work.
Consequently, the events of the film require your willing suspension of disbelief, and I recommend that you grant it. When events in a work of fiction happen in a way that you might disbelieve could happen in real life, remember that it is a work of fiction. Allow the writer the freedom to make things happen not because they meet the odds of probability, but because he is the author and he has poetic license to tell his story. We did, after all, just mention the German fairy tale tradition. And a fairy tale does not seek to conform to real life.
The aspiring author Wilhelm might not yet know what he is doing, but the young but already veteran auteur Wim does.
Or as Ray Bradbury says in his novel Dandelion Wine (1974).
The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer.
Why and how?
Because I say it is so.
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