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Fallen Angels

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Wenders loves to play with the ideas of childhood, time, and the parallels between Damiel and Marion. Comments on the way children look at things are repeated over and over, most likely indicating Damiel's childlikeness after he falls. During scenes in which Damiel is watching Marion, she remembers her childhood. Time is also an important theme. Damiel has eternity as an angel. He would give it up, if only to hold one apple in his hand. Marion feels as though she's waited an eternity for love. Only when Damiel loses his eternity does she find love. There are many parallels between Damiel and Marion. At the beginning of the film, Damiel asks several questions in a voice-over: "Why am I me and not you? Why am I here and not there? When did time begin and where does space end?...How can it be that I didn't exist before I came to be and that someday, the one who I am will no longer be who I am?" After we meet Marion, she asks these same questions. As she leaves the circus tent after losing her job, one of the stagehands remarks "There goes another fallen angel." She often mentions colours, which Damiel cannot see until he falls. It seems that although she is a human and he still an angel at this point, they have a lot in common. Perhaps she is becoming more and more angellike as he becomes more and more humanlike, until they meet. This theme is repeated in City of Angels, with a slightly different style.

The majority of Wings of Desire is in black and white, mixed with sepia tones. The viewer sees the images as the angels do (the angels can't see colour). Whenever there isn't an angel present, we see colour. It appears that as Damiel moves toward the decision to fall, he changes from pure black and white to sepia until his fall, when he and everything else are finally in colour. But because this is Berlin in 1988, the colour is pretty dingy. The black and white images are much more beautiful, and make the black and white portions of the film more lyrical.

FARAWAY, SO CLOSE
Faraway, So Close is Wenders's 1993 sequel to Wings of Desire. It continues the story with the fall of Cassiel. Most of the story has no counterpart in City of Angels, but it is worth mentioning for a few reasons. First, it explains more fully Wenders's concept of angels. They carry word and light to humans. They are neither word nor light, but merely messengers. They are nothing. To them, we are everything. Cassiel tells us this in almost those exact words at the beginning of the picture. Another angel, a woman, has been added, and she repeats them at the end. Angels are almost innocents, not really knowing right from wrong once they've fallen. They cannot do anything. They can carry messages and comfort, but cannot change the course of events. God is still non-existent. The angels make all their decisions by themselves.

Second, Faraway, So Close is important because more is shown of what an angel goes through on earth immediately after he's fallen. A good bit of this sequence is incorporated into City of Angels. Several of Cassiel's experiences as a very new human (rain, being mugged and robbed, not having money to get food, etc.) are experienced by Seth in City of Angels.

CITY OF ANGELS
City of Angels tells of Seth, an angel, who travels around Los Angeles taking dead people home. As he's doing this one night, he notices a young heart surgeon, Maggie Rice, and he wants to see her more and more. He wonders what it would be like to be human, and discusses the possibility (or impossibility) with his friend Cassiel. After watching Maggie for some time, Seth makes a bold move and allows her to see him. She is fascinated, although mystified, by this man without a past who challenges her entire belief system, which is based on her own abilities make things happen and keep people alive in her operating room. Before long, she discovers his true identity and also that he can fall, which he does. They have one ecstatic night together, then she is tragically killed in a highway accident. The movie ends with Seth joyously, though with a bittersweet edge, bodysurfing in the Pacific, a thing he couldn't do as angel with no sense of touch.

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Page last updated 8/1/04.