Until the End of the World

(Bis ans Ende der Welt, Wim Wenders, Germany/Australia/France/USA, 1991 & 2014)

It is astonishing how often commentators on this film automatically trot out the publicity exclamation (apparently coined by Wim Wenders himself) “the ultimate road movie!” – since, in the director’s cut restored and consolidated in 2014, that aspect accounts for only its first two-and-a-quarter hours, not its final two-and-a-half. And even the initial, three-hour version released (reluctantly, on Wenders’ part) condenses the same pattern: a lot of globe-trotting (Raúl Ruiz once told me that it’s a great film to fall asleep in, since you can “doze off in Lisbon and wake up in New York”), followed by a long, communal shut-in – in the Australian desert, no less – that delivers a high-tech family melodrama while (as the characters infer) the rest of the civilised planet has evaporated, sci-fi-style, in a nuclear catastrophe involving a rogue Indian satellite.

And Part 2, as it turns out, is better than Part 1. There’s a war going on here – at least, I suspect, in the heads of those tasked with the job of promoting the movie – between different parts of Wenders’ sensibility or legacy. What’s the best foot to put forward: the endlessly hip wanderlust (station to station … ), with its debt to the ‘60s/‘70s American road movie tradition, its urban facades and infinite U2-Lou Reed-Neneh Cherry playlist; or the Bergmaniacal/Tarkovskyesque angst over fathers and sons, a society of image-spectacle, and the redemptive role of (literary) storytelling?

Given that what we have on our hands here is an evidently long drop down in quality from the magisterial Wings of Desire (1987), the publicists understandably roll their dice (still today, in the Criterion edition) on the former option.

What kind of grand folly, what Coppola-like going-for-broke, did this project represent? Already by 1993, faced with the woeful Wings of Desire sequel Far Away, So Close!, Antoine de Baecque was calling the setting sun on Wenders, who had clearly “lost his way”. How did such a fall from grace happen so swiftly? Until the End of the World was not only a spectacular fumble in Wenders’ until-then illustrious, ever-ascending career; like a curse, it seemed to initiate a long spell in the festival/arthouse wilderness for him – effectively three decades, with only a few bright, intermittent flashes along that gloomy path – until Perfect Days (2023) happily turned his fortunes around at age 77. Can he continue that upward swerve?

Michael Almereyda – who worked for a few years on an early draft of the screenplay of Until the End of the World, eventually earning himself a modest credit for his help – had a premonition of what Wenders was aiming for, and also what could go wrong with that vision.

The movie was to be a grand, globe-hopping summation of Wenders images and themes. It was about everything – travel, memory, seeing, image-making, love, faith, the future. It was to be the ultimate road movie, an epic love story, a film about dreams, a dream film. […] It was also a remarkable muddle, overcrowded, a mess. Other writers had run from it for a reason. 

In truth, neither major section of Until the End of the World really gets a grip; but the problems are different on either side of intermission. The first part changes locale frequently (Venice, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, San Francisco … ), but it’s a drag all the way, pulling in the handy ‘cops/crims/private detectives/bounty hunters in pursuit’ narrative device (to which Wenders remains obstinately and inordinately attached) to hopefully generate a bit of eventful variety. It doesn’t.

All these supposedly lovably eccentric characters – played by, among others, Ernie Dingo, Chick Ortega and Wenders regular Rüdiger Vogler – end up in the desert as well, mainly just to laze around and play musical instruments. There’s some silly voice-over justification for this: the act of heroine Claire, turning off the main, congested highway at an initiating moment in France, changed so many lives!

But nothing in Part 1 works well: the ‘underworld’ glimpses of this-or-that crowded, grungey metro station or decadent pleasure-party locale are pre-mulched clichés; and the more colourful, Pop Art views of street vistas still look like touristic postcards. In the central ensemble of actors, William Hurt acquits himself OK as the enigmatic lover Sam Farber (he plays encroaching blindness well) and Sam Neill as troubled husband Eugene projects both consternation and frazzled bemusement (especially in his duets with Vogler) – but Solveig Dommartin as Claire Tourneur, it has to be said, is wooden, indecisive in her gestures, and plain bloody awful. (It makes you realise how cannily she was directed in Wings of Desire.) The longed-for ‘mythic resonance’ of Claire as a modern Penelope (on the trail of Sam as Odysseus) just ain’t happening. Dommartin is (was, alas: dead in 2007 at age 45) particularly bad at executing physical comedy (see the excruciating scene in a Tokyo men’s club) – and this kind of jolly slapstick, to compound the problem, is the worst-judged card up Wenders’ sleeve, even in the otherwise welcome comeback hit of Perfect Days.

Part 2 hangs together more organically, but it, too, rankles. When I initially attempted to grapple with the film in 1993 (in an outtake titled “The Shrunken World” from my first book, Phantasms), I found myself trotting out an all-too-easy ideological critique (playing the role, as I described it in Mysteries of Cinema, of the offended critic): Sam extolling (in Part 1) the beauty of pygmy chants was too of-a-piece with the worst, most commodified World Music/SBS TV ‘multicultural’ tendencies of the time; and it was only a tiny but fatal step over the border from that species of cosmopolitanism to the all-in ‘appropriation of indigeneity’ going on in the scenes of Jeanne Moreau among the black women (‘secret business’ – was that Australian novelist Peter Carey’s contribution to the script? His literary fan club tends to pass over this cinema-excursion in embarrassed silence). At such moments, Until the End of the World stooped to the cringe-level of Werner Herzog’s quite similar Aussie outback fantasia, Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) – another all-round disaster, albeit a weirdly fascinating one.

Today, I can better take such posturing nonsense in my amused stride as a viewer – but what really gets to me now is Wenders’ retrograde attitude to the unconscious. Just when you think the story may be winding up at the point of the mother’s/Moreau’s death, Max von Sydow as crabby Henry (Sam’s father) switches his hyper-rational, super-technological obsession: not content with having granted sight to the blind (by astonishing neuroscientific processes of video-recording and memory-encoding – not only vision but experience of feeling!), he passes on to the plan of recording dreams using the same means. Bad move!

Not only does the Aboriginal tribe (that made him an honorary member) desert him – “You want to take our dreaming? Our secret business?” – but watching one’s own murky dream-images triggers narcissistic addiction (these are the words used in and by the film) in both Claire and Sam. In fact – and despite Henry’s brave invocation of both Freud and Jung – Until the End of the World here approaches old-fashioned, pre-Freudian Gothic Horror in its evident fear of all the unnamed and unspeakable “nightmares” dwelling in the dark, surging ocean of the unconscious. Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983), on the same premise, is a thousand times better and more thoughtful!

What Wenders serves up is worse than a typical Stephen King morality play: dreams are evil, just don’t go there! (Perfect Days is, thankfully, kinder to the dream-realm.) Even though this part of Until the End of the World hits (for once, and for a while) a pleasing plateau of mood, performance and audio-visual effect (somewhat in the league of Philippe Grandrieux, via the electronic image-mix of Chris Marker’s Sunless [1983]), the content is pretty vacuous … yet again.

Then there’s the ‘image critique’. Although Wenders prides himself on having correctly anticipated many of the everyday technologies of the 21st century (he could, however, have spared us their cartoonish soundtrack of noise effects), not to mention Y2K millennial madness (the story is set on the cusp of 1999/2000), where he goes with this – into a homily about images (oh so many images!) suffocating the present while stories (the antidote to the image-virus) provide a way to imagine the future – is a total bummer. Especially in light of the fact (as I noted in ’93) that, while Wenders (alongside brilliant DOP Robby Müller) has always been, almost effortlessly, a Poet of the Image, he was (and is still) quite poor at conventionally intriguing story-spinning in any genre. Almereyda sensed this problem afoot, too, in the mid ‘80s work sessions.

Day by day, I’d look over at Wim and say: “Yeah, that’s a great idea, but the story doesn’t move forward one inch.” […] I kept referring to Godard films as an index, particularly Pierrot le fou – the use of narration to telescope events, the blithe swings between pulp adventure and documentary matter-of-factness, characters shifting from bright cutout shapes to something more urgently human.

The ‘urgently human’ part never materialised, and it’s worth inquiring why, beyond the usual reviewing platitudes concerning ‘lack of psychological character depth’ and whatnot. Everyone knows that Wenders is a cinephile, but the very particular character of the intertextuality that characterises and suffuses his work (past and present) is a niggling business that many of his fan-exegetes avoid properly seeing or accounting for. There’s an enormous amount of self-reference (self-homage, almost) in Until the End of the World – memories of Kings of the Road (Dad problems), The State of Things (American psycho Allen Garfield), Lightning Over Water (Tom Farrell’s weird two-scene cameo, as if to conjure the wayward ghost of Nicholas Ray) – and then there’s all the other-reference.

This latter reflex renders his films as sometimes zany surface-palimpsests in the manner of F.J. Ossang (and, indeed, Ossang’s fetish-actor from Portugal, Diogo Dória, pops up – via Manoel de Oliveira). Hence we get the ‘serene Ozu’ Japan segment of blindness-healing (stretched beyond endurance in the full version) featuring Chishu Ryu; the Bergman-tribute embodied in von Sydow and the Nouvelle Vague/Antonioni tribute embodied in Moreau … and on and on. (Almereyda informs us that he talked Wenders & Dommartin out of casting Godard as an “irascible pilot” à la Soigne ta droite [1987].)

Wenders tends, more broadly, to merrily exploit whatever ‘attraction’ is to hand: comedian-performer Paul Livingstone does a 30-second routine in the mode of his popular clownish-character Flacco, to the wild hilarity of his co-workers – and anyone outside of Australia must have wondered what that was all about.

Even the song list works this way: once Wenders has all his musical pals committed, he’s determined to slow down anything that will help accommodate as much of a track as possible. It all adds up to a very rickety scaffolding on which to build any sort of overarching structure, whether Homeric or Godardian.

Without being too indiscreet (or prurient) on the matter, it’s clear to any viewer with even a little background information that this was a project launched at the beginning of a romantic and collaborative partnership (of Wenders with Dommartin in the mid ‘80s), brought to its termination point amidst the somewhat uncomfortable ashes of that same relationship. Love and Art! There is a disquieting reflection of this depressing devolution not merely in the typically melancholic castrato position of Eugene throughout (forever gazing at Claire and Sam intertwined), but particularly in the penultimate (pre-outer space) sequence: Eugene’s narration justifying why he, Claire and Sam are now “beyond physical relationships” and into something undoubtedly higher (on the spiritual plane) and nobler because it’s “of service” to others (a constant refrain in the not-very-well-composed voice-over text) …

Dommartin will scarcely score a cameo in Far Away, So Close! – she, too, has been folded, by then, into the ghostly/angelic, miasmic palimpsest of the auteur’s self-reference. And there’s another (not unrelated to the previous love-gone-wrong) crucial factor at play in the metamorphosis of Wenders’ career that occurs in the early ‘90s, which cannot go unmentioned: his heartfelt embrace of (or doubling-down on) Christianity at the beginning of his long-lasting relationship with Donata Wenders, née Donata Johanna Schmidt.

MORE Wenders: The Blues, The Brothers Skladanowsky, Buena Vista Social Club, The End of Violence, Hammett, Land of Plenty, The Million Dollar Hotel, Paris, Texas, Alice in the Cities

© Adrian Martin May & December 1993 / May 2024