In short: Im Lauf der Zeit (1976)

aka Kings of the Road (which, frankly, is the better title for the movie at hand, but we Germans always must demonstrate how intellectual we are)

By many, this three hour film that never feels long (and most certainly not too long) is still seen as German director Wim Wenders’s best film. I still have to make my way through the five hour version of Until the Ends of the World, so I can belay that decision. It is certainly one of the best films that came out of the shadow of the German Autorenkino; in part because Wenders was independent-minded enough to take from that particular arthouse style what he needed and could use, discard the rest, and use elements of all those other film styles he loved to make his films his own. Unlike most German directors, Wenders has always been interested in emotions as much as in ideas, not treating them like a kind of abomination that can only end in World War II and pogroms, or as an illness a film has to diagnose. Consequently, this is a film that demands interest in and empathy with its characters, the sort of thing that, or so I’ve heard, is the basis of understanding.

From time to time, you still get a few moments in the dry didactic German style, or some hand-wringing about the state of cinema, or some pretty embarrassing bits of “men talk about the mystery that is The Woman”, but for every second of that, there are scenes and scenes of sensitive insight into (very male-centric versions of, sure) loneliness, the joys of the road, the workings of complicated friendships, and a belief in the powers of quiet compassion that feels deeply held and absolutely convincing. For once in a German movie, the actors – Rüdiger Vogel and Hanns Zischler – don’t even have sticks implanted in their behinds but can actually calmly, relaxedly act and just be.

All of this is filmed in beautiful black and white by Wenders’s usual DOP Robbie Müller, turning the parts of Germany barely anyone ever wants to put into a movie just as fascinating and beautiful – often in surprising ways – as the America of the road movies Wenders so admired (and would soon shoot in). Speaking of which, as someone from and living in the provinces of Lower Saxony, it’s a particular joy to find places I actually know treated this way in the film’s first act, turned strangely beautiful and familiar at the same time. That’s probably not a big thing if you live in New York, LA, Paris, Vancouver, or Bronson Canyon, but if you were born and raised in Wolfsburg, it is quite the thing to see how Wenders treats the old, even uglier version of the city train station (or that Hanns Zischler doesn’t know how to pronounce “Gifhorn”) I remember all too well, or have the characters pop over to a cinema in Helmstedt that’s still standing now. There’s a sense of nostalgia to that, too, but then, unlike what I’ve been told, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that feeling.

Some Thoughts About Der amerikanische Freund (1977) & Ripley’s Game (2002)

Even if you ignore the twenty-five years of change in the technical aspects of filmmaking and the world around it, it does come as a bit of a surprise how different these two adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novel - the older directed by Wim Wenders, the newer by Liliana Cavani – are. Even though both films hew very close to some of the main plot beats, there’s a world of difference in sensibility between them. As a dear friend of mine remarked when I tried to explain the difference between the films, it’s a lot like a piece of classical music realized by (very) different conductors.

The choice of very different lead actors and two very different approaches to the character of Tom Ripley seem to me symptomatic for the difference between the two films: where John Malkovich in the Cavani film hews closer to Highsmith’s text and is a cultured sociopath whose main relation to neurotypical humanity seems to me a curiosity about how people who are very much not like him function internally, Dennis Hopper’s Ripley is a guy in cowboy hat who understands high art probably as well as the Malkovich character does but seems to find actual enjoyment in those things Malkovich-Ripley will probably sniff at as low-brow, and who seems not as precisely drawn as is his 2002 counterpart. There’s a blurriness around Hopper-Ripley’s edges, a wavering between a kind of melancholy that would be alien to Malkovich’s Ripley and the ability for ruthless action they both share. As its Ripley, so are the films: Wenders’s movie feels much more leisurely, much more interested in exploring the inner life of Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan Zimmermann (his version of Dougray Scott’s character in the Cavani film) but also arguing that you can’t understand anyone’s inner life in a precise way. Meandering and circling and walking in a direction that might very well be the wrong one (but one won’t know until one has tried) is more Wenders’s style.


Cavani’s film, on the other hand, seems to me to be all about precision and hard edges, to always know where it is going and why in the clearest manner. Malkovich’s portrayal of Ripley is of a fastidious and neat man who always gives at least the illusion of control, so Cavani’s treatment of the plot needs to and does feel much tighter and leaner than Wenders’s approach. One would be tempted to call her film more conventional, but that does sound rather patronizing to a film that is as strong as this one, and that is as much about finding beauty in the strangest of places, moments and people as it is about its thriller plot. Perhaps the difference is that one of these films was made by a woman who is nearly seventy and has seen and experienced a lot more and the other one by a comparatively young man who still had a lot to catch up on when he made it.