Wim Wenders | Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities) / 1974

shaking off the frost

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wim Wenders and Veith von Fürstenberg (screenplay),  (director) Alice in den Städten (Alice in the Cities) / 1974

 

Wim Wenders Alice in the Cities begins as a rather artful study of how people from elsewhere have difficulty in attempting to comprehend what the US is all about. Today, I might add, it is difficult for even citizens of the US to understand. And I think if I’d landed in Surf City and the other Southern spots where this movie begins, I’d be just as confused and would find it near impossible to write an essay about it.

    Except for Florida, which I did not find compatible, I have never attempted to even visit the US South—although I have written about numerous of its writers. Yet I think the major figure of this tale, Philip Winter (Rüdiger Vogler), is a man almost already frozen to death despite his early attempts to keep himself going by singing the popular 1964 The Drifters song, Under the Boardwalk. He can’t get the music or the lyrics right, and under the boardwalk wherein Philip is attempting to sing while photographing what he sees, there is little of pleasure, the surrounding world being truly bleak.

     In fact, the whole of the US in this film, which Wenders shot in unforgiving black-and-white, seems bleak. No glorious visions of afternoon sunsets or even a view of the lovely afternoon surf of the Atlantic or Bay of Mexico waters here. This is a cruel world, in which, as Philip later describes it, everything that might be of interest—with the exception of John Ford’s movie Young Mr. Lincoln—is chopped up into segments between ridiculous local advertisements, which infuriates the moody writer who has missed his Munich deadline and cannot get an advance to finish his piece.     

   The Manhattan to which he returns is a grungy, graffitied world, not the hyper-wealth tourist destination it is today. I remember just such a city, a few years earlier of the late 1960s and early 1970s and even the days when this film was shot; when Howard and I once shared a taxi with a young Southern woman on her way to his first Broadway play, when we told her that 46th was her destination, she hesitated before descending the taxi, fearfully proclaiming: “Oh no, this cannot be Broadway!”

   The gloomy Philip gets it right when he asks his New York connection, “How can you write coherently about the US?” No one can, let alone someone from somewhere else. Photographs, taken in these days with an automatic Polaroid camera, when the photo, not in clear definition, popped out the moment after you shot, taking a few moments to actually reveal the image, were perhaps the only answers to “Where was I, what did I just see?” Yet, as our moody hero laments. “They never turn out like what you’ve just seen!”

     Of course, you couldn’t then and, perhaps can even less so today—particularly when you’re short of cash and have to sell your Chrysler to a cut-rate dealer’s next to Shea Stadium in Queens (another place I lived during my own bleak year in the great New York City)—experience the pleasures of any such city. Attempting to get a ticket back to Germany, he finds that the German flight-workers ae on strike, and the nearest destination he might get to Munich is Amsterdam. Another woman at the ticket counter, Lisa (Liza Keruzer), who speaks little English, and her daughter, Alice (the amazing you performer Yella Rottländer), are trapped in the same situation, and Lisa asks that Philip not only help her in obtaining her tickets, but that he stay near to her while she waits out the day until they can travel to the Netherlands.

     Lisa, apparently, is escaping a failed relationship, her husband determined to remain in New York while she feels the need to return to Germany. Because of their dire financial straits, the trio is forced to stay at a fleabag hotel—which certainly no longer exists—and, accordingly, they must share the room they have obtained.

    In any other movie, predictably, the couple would find themselves in bed together and fall desperately in love. But Wenders’ film is utterly different. Yes, they do share the bed, but Lisa refuses sex, and Philip, at any rate, seems a poor romancer, always, as he is, in a kind of eternal funk about having apparently lost his writing abilities. He “scribbles” as Alice observes, but can longer produce anything; he seems as frigid as his last name and just as unable to enter any Springtime romance. By the time he awakens, Lisa has left, ordering him by note to take her daughter to Amsterdam where she will later meet them. She apparently has business to clear up with her ex-lover.

     Philip is so passive and Alice so endearing, that he cannot do anything other than what the missing mother has demanded. As critics have pointed out, today this film would have been nearly impossible to make; the male would be immediately characterized as a pedophile, and the young girl perceived of as a kind of Lolita, enticing him at the same moment she is rejecting his intentions. But Wenders makes it quite clear that Philip, although tenderly interested in the young girl, is not at all interested in her body.

     When they arrive in Amsterdam, upon discovering that Lisa has not arrived and is not scheduled to, the film turns into a very strange road movie wherein the two set out by car to discover Alice’s grandmother, whose name she cannot remember and has only a vague recollection of where she might live. Philip lists the major German cities and villages, Wuppertal being the only one that seems plausible to Alice.

   Yet their search there turns up nothing as they rove through the streets trying to search out a spot which the young child might remember.

    A little bit like Lolita, she demands food, ice-cream, and chance to swim, and other small pleasures which the nearly penniless Philip attempts to provide her, gradually becoming convinced that he has no choice but to turn her over to the police.

    A bit like the equally independent-minded adolescent, Georges Queneau’s Zazie, she escapes the police, returning to the man who has now become her surrogate father. They’re soon traveling on a visit to the Ruhr district of German, which she now recalls is where her grandmother might have lived.

    Philip, himself, has evidently come from that region, and it becomes apparent through Wenders’ telling that perhaps they were destined for one another, Alice in order to discover a truer father figure, and he to be reawakened to life with the young uncontrollable force he sweetly has agreed to help. Somehow we grow increasingly to love these two lost souls as the movie moves toward it conclusion. And I should imagine that most viewers secretly hope that they won’t find the not-so-pleasant grandmother living in a lost two-story house somewhere in Germany.

      Ultimately, however, they are tracked down by the police; the missing mother has been found. So Wenders film comes crashing down to its inevitable ending, not so very differently from his later film, Paris, Texas, another foray into US consciousness. Perhaps, just as Travis Henderson was brought back to life by reclaiming his young son, so will Philip Winter will have shaken off the frost in temporarily adopting a young daughter in Alice.

     Certainly they are no worse for the wear in their relationship. We can only wonder, however, how the energetic and perceptive Alice might now feel about her almost lost mother. Alice has seemingly, while moving through the many cities to which she adventures, lost some of herself, as her clinging to the stranger Philip makes clear. And what will become of him? He not only has apparently lost his career, but by film’s end, the only person with whom he has bonded. Where is his home, his grandmother, even his mother and father? He has only vague photos which don’t reveal their own realities.

 

Los Angeles, August 11, 2019

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2019).