KINGS OF THE ROAD

 Wim Wenders' "Kings of the Road" comes as close to naturalism, or to what I prefer to call 'actuality', as cinema gets. While the narrative relies heavily on the tropes of narrative cinema the presentation is anything but conventional. Wenders allows his film to evolve in a way that seems wholly to belong to the characters on the screen and not to the actors, the writer or the director, (Wenders, in both cases).

There is a plot of sorts. Bruno, (Rudiger Vogler), travels to towns along the East German border repairing cinema equipment. Robert, (Hanns Zischler), is the man who drives his car into a river while Bruno is having a rest break and who then settles into the passenger seat of Bruno's truck. They travel together, never quite becoming friends. It's almost as if Wender's allows them control over their own stories with both actors simply becoming the characters they are playing.

It's a long film, (three hours). with little resembling narrative action. It's like a documentary with a few divertissements along the way reminding us that however naturalistic it might seem it's only a 'film' after all, (a pick-up in a cinema that is neither sexual or romantic, 'borrowing' a motorcycle for a jaunt into the past). It is also a love letter to cinema and to American cinema in particular, a road movie about movies that should please the most ardent of cinephiles and which is certainly the equal of "Wings of Desire" and "Paris, Texas" in the Wenders' canon.