Wrong Move

Rüdiger Vogler and Hanna Schygulla

Wim Wenders' Wrong Move, from 1975, was the second of three road movies Wenders made during the 70s starring Rüdiger Vogler. It was Wenders first color feature and part of his longtime collaboration with the writer Peter Handke. Handke based the film on Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, a seminal bildungsroman, but Handke just uses Goethe's premise as a springboard for a young man's journey from through West Germany. The film opens with aerial shot of Mr. Meister's home town of Boppard. Various modes of conveyance are used in the picture by the characters and serve as motifs for the director: trains, subways, ferries, bikes, autos. The film's most typical shot is a dolly of two characters walking and talking, through squares, streets, hill, and dale. The late great Robby Müller's plein air cinematography gives the characters room to breathe and spout philosophical reveries. It has an unfussy elegance to it that helps put over the empathy with which Wenders regards his characters.

We first encounter Wenders' Wilhelm Meister regarding the town square of Boppard from his window. He is dressed in bourgeoise fashion and lolls about his room listening to the Troggs in a mood of sullen despair. He breaks his windows and his complacency in an angry fit and draws blood, in the film's first too obvious instance of the use of blood as a symbol of German collective guilt. Mama has had enough and though she says she loves Wilhelm's "unrest and discontent" (Thanks Mom!), she says he must leave home in order to gain the experience he needs to fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. Wilhelm bids a curt and unromantic adieu to his girlfriend. Significantly, she, like the other two women who become enamored with the diffident Wilhelm through the course of the film, is in a guise and not playing her "real" self. Wenders gives the great Lisa Kreuzer a magnificent entrance, doffing her wig and exposing her true self to her feckless lover before Wilhelm departs on his peripatetic journey. Then she is lost to us and Wilhelm.

Wenders throws at his audience, a la Godard, a host of cultural nods during the course of his hero's sentimental education: Flaubert, Faulkner, The Kinks, Bob Dylan, Straub-Huillet, Schiller, Beethoven, Eichendorff. However, these allusions are discarded as, over the course of the film, Wilhelm travels with a band of misfits who are attracted to his unassuming charisma. They all have their stories and their dreams, which they recount, but it is their unvarnished humanity which ultimately shakes Wilhelm out of his solipsism, a little. In this, Wenders is greatly helped by his most professionally lauded and accomplished cast thus far. Vogler was already an axiom of Wenders' cinema and, expectedly, fits snugly. Hanna Schygulla, taking a break from the S and M fables of Fassbinder, is at her most beautiful and touching. Though I admit there is more than a bit of masochism in her character, an actress who falls for the remote Wilhelm. Hans Christian Blech, Peter Kern, and Ivan Desny all offer memorable vignettes as varyingly toxic examples of German masculinity. All of the actors help make Handke's high falutin rhetoric remain anchored instead of floating off into the clouds.

Vogler and Nastassja Kinski

Nastassja Kinski, making her film debut, is another kettle of fish entirely. Kinski plays a Lolitaesque mute, part of a transient grifting duo. She thinks Wilhelm is the cat's pajamas and nuzzles up to him whenever she can. Kinski has an abortive nude romantic scene with Vogler (she was twelve or so) and while some may tut-tut, I found Wenders ambivalence towards adolescent sexuality refreshing and not exploitive. Certainly, Kinski's lack of dialogue helps makes this one of her most convincing performances.

All in all, the cockeyed dourness of Wrong Moves makes me see why it is the most obscure of Wenders' road trilogy. The coming to account of a character with his Nazi past struck me more as a sign of artistic pretension than insight, but, on the whole, the people we meet in Wrong Move, are interesting and evocative. It is the tender regard that Wenders treats even his blackest characters that redeems the sometimes feckless journey of this film.