All of Wim Wenders' preoccupations were already on display in his
early masterpiece "Alice in the Cities"; the road, travel, America, (and
American music), alienation, angst. The 'story' is simplicity itself; a
German photo-journalist, on an assignment in America, and one which he
fails to complete, finds himself saddled with 9 year old Alice after
meeting her and her mother as they try to book tickets back to Germany.
When the mother abandons the child with
him he seems to readily accept the responsibility of looking after her.
He is something of a lost soul and in the child, Alice, perhaps he sees a
mirror image of himself.
Today the premiss may seem somewhat unlikely yet it fits perfectly into
Wenders' skewed vision of the world. He shot in monochrome, (Robby
Muller was again DoP), giving it the feel of a documentary and as our
hero, Rudiger Vogler is superbly naturalistic as is Yella Rottlander as
Alice. They make a great, unsentimental team; the film may owe a debt to
American cinema but it's without any of the sickly sentimentality you
usually find in American films dealing with 'lost' children. Indeed,
everything that happens seems remarkably matter-of-fact but this is a
picture of life, not as it's lived, but as Wenders imagines it should be
lived; it's both abstract and humanist and it remains one of the finest
of all German films.
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