In movies angels are generally busy-body know-it-alls, running about rescuing humans from their vast varieties of sin and error. Not so in this movie, where they are poised on Berlin’s rooftops, privy to every conversation, every stupid idea and intention going on below, but powerless to intervene. Or, for that matter, to smell, taste or feel an apple. One of them (the superb Bruno Ganz) notices an equally lost and lonely trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) and encouraged by Peter Falk (playing a version of himself) his needs break through the barriers of angelic convention, love sweetly triumphs and a black and white film blushes into color. It’s a movie that might have fallen into sentimentality at any one of a dozen moments, but thanks to Peter Handke’s wryly realistic writing and Wenders’s gently controlled direction, it never does. It’s a perfect fantasy for people who usually deplore fantasy. But people with a suspicious regard for the twee will like it as well.
