Wrong Move

Wilhelm lives in a small town and wants to be a writer. He puts his fist through a window. His mother gives him a ticket and tells him to go. He takes the train. People join him along the way: an old man and the young girl with him, a poet, an actress. The group walks together, stays in houses, talks. Wilhelm writes nothing. There is something in the old man's past to do with the Nazi period and he keeps it hidden. The journey arrives nowhere; at the end Wilhelm is standing alone on a mountain. Wim Wenders directs; Peter Handke wrote the screenplay. Rüdiger Vogler plays Wilhelm and Hans Christian Blech the old man; Hanna Schygulla and Nastassja Kinski are in the cast. It is a German production. The screenplay starts from Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister but is a rewriting rather than an adaptation. The film sits in the middle of the series called Wenders's road trilogy. Nastassja Kinski was very young in it and this is among her first work; the character never speaks. The matter it treats is silence in postwar Germany; the old man's past is the real question inside the narrative. The narrative gives none of the satisfaction of the classic road film; there is movement but no development. The photography is by Robby Müller and the German landscape is kept cold inside the narrative. Its limit is pace; the narrative is very slow, the characters distant, and the ending gives no closure. Who it is for: viewers who like German cinema of the seventies and Wenders's road films. Who it is not for: it is slow, cold, and the ending unresolved.