Kritiken

The Germany of Wrong Move looks like the present more than today's films set in the 1970s feel like the '70s. It's not just the fashions but the attitudes — the sense of aimlessness and the search for meaning in a fallen world — that resemble our time. Wenders and Handke repudiate Goethe's Romanticism, yet the film feels brighter and clearer than films today, like the air in the mountains where Wilhelm ends up.

A performer with [Alice in the Cities actress Yella] Rottländer's remarkable casualness is absent from Wrong Move, a platform for philosophical discourse that wrangles together a ragtag bunch on a cross-country pilgrimage whose destination ends up being just "somewhere in a crowd." Here, Wenders's penchant for schematics takes over, with each character rendered an ideological instrument through stilted dialogue.

The Road Trilogy was made by a young filmmaker extending his reach, his resources, achieving early maturity and mastery. It's extremely rare to find movies this open-ended and assured, lucid and lyrical, tender and truthful, anchored in the here and now yet timeless. They are brimming with a sense of shared adventure.

As the writer gropes for the language he can't speak, the filmmaker reports about travel, love, loss, even, against all the odds and the spirit of a script he is meant to follow, the excitement of carrying on, being alive. That is, Wenders, while keeping his old friend's script intact, balances its ruthlessness, its despair, with virtuoso filmmaking, with a road movie that traces heart lines through a country that is broken and haunted but still often stunning.

The film leans a bit hard on voiceover narration and is far uglier and more depressive than the trilogy's bookends but perhaps serves as a necessary corrective to the other two films, suggesting as it does that there's no escaping one's own inner nature.

The trilogy's awkward middle child, Wrong Move (75) opens as Alice in the Cities ends, surveying Germany from above in an aerial shot. The story alights upon some conflation of 18th and 20th centuries as it fuses Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship with the interests of Wenders and his key collaborators, writer Peter Handke and cinematographer Robby Müller.

The wordiness of Wrong Move is a little hard to swallow, but what's clear, ironically, is that it's really a film about film, and about the desire to film.

A bitter, deadpan parody of all things Romantic, Wenders's film is also so ironic about its own emptiness that it ends up being something pure: a pop dirge about how never sitting still may be the only answer to meaninglessness.

With the overlay of the high line of German culture onto the world of young rockers, of the theatrical exuberance of the eighteenth century onto the rumpled rounds of modern urban buskers, and the grand literary heritage onto the indelible national stain of the Nazi-era depravities, Wenders turns a self-consciously casual ramble into a vast soul-searching—which is itself a tradition.

This "anti-bildungsroman" road movie doesn't balance the director's contradictory interests as well as THE AMERICAN FRIEND (made two years later) or the long version of UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD do; as a matter of fact, it leans pretty firmly in the direction of the "empty spaces." As a film, it's almost hermetically bleak; as an attempt to take the moral/intellectual temperature of a certain European generation, it's nearly unmatched.

[Wenders] stages the narrative's progression as a series of clarifications visualized -- extraordinarily expressed in Robby Müller's lengthy tracking shots, as in a walk up a mountain road shifts from poetics to concentration camp memories. If lacking the behavioral felicities of Alice in the Cities and the visual epiphanies of Kings of the Road, the film nevertheless shares their sense of discovery and need to connect and, ultimately, to feel.

Everyone wants to be an artist, but no one has anything to say. The wrong moves are geographical, historical, social, and aesthetic. It's Wenders's most dour film, and the grim tone takes its toll. There is, though, a solid and disturbing talent at work here.