Faraway, So Close!

Berlin after the Wall. The angel Cassiel steps in to save a falling child and becomes human. Unlike Damiel, who made the same choice in the first film, Cassiel cannot carry his humanity; he is unemployed, starts drinking and falls in with a gang working for an American arms dealer. At the end he sacrifices himself to save his friends. Wim Wenders directed. It is the sequel to Wings of Desire from 1987. Otto Sander, Bruno Ganz and Peter Falk return in their roles, with Falk again playing himself. Among the new names are Nastassja Kinski as the angel Raphaella and Willem Dafoe as a mysterious figure called Emit Flesti, which read backwards is Time Itself. Two small parts stand out: Lou Reed appears as himself, and the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev makes his film debut. It won the Grand Prix du Jury at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. The reviews were mixed, with assessments calling it both lyrical and profoundly goofy and a wondrous mess. At the box office it fell well short of the first film. Who it is for: people who love the first film and want to see Berlin in the nineties. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the same poetry. The film drifts into a crime story in its second half and the two registers do not hold together.