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Wings of Desire is also the rare instance of a foreign film that was remade (as City of Angels) with a more tragic ending rather than a happier one. There’s a certain perverse charm in that, I think. Many purists were up in arms that Wenders’ vision, which admittedly contains more rumination on the nature of man’s struggle to achieve peace with one’s self than it does shots of streaming sunlight refracting off of Meg Ryan’s golden tresses, was “reduced” to a powerfully sentimental (even maudlin) tale of love found, then lost to an O. Henry plot twist. I reserve the right to enjoy both films. Wings of Desire moves my spirit and reminds me of Wenders’ assured nuttiness. City of Angels moves my tear ducts and keeps a fair damper on Nicolas Cage’s perennial nuttiness.

With its couple coming together nicely at the end, Wings of Desire wasn’t an obvious candidate for a sequel. But as Damiel fell, so did the Berlin Wall and Wenders uses 1993’s Faraway, So Close! as an excuse to revisit his characters in a world turned upside down with notions of glasnost and a black market that supports everything from guns to pornography for would-be gangsters looking to make a buck. Even the title captures this sense of uncertainty and hesitation (Faraway is drawn together while So Close is spaced out), albeit with an emphatically insistent (!) finish.

In a neat, though ultimately dispiriting inverse of the first film, Faraway attempts to be lighter, and certainly funnier, but sinks with portent by trying to cover too many plot bases. In true sequel fashion, the film repeats its predecessor’s core storyline (this time it is Damiel’s fellow angel Cassiel, played by Otto Sander, who takes the plunge to Earth, unintentionally, to save a little girl’s life) and brings back the most notable supporting character - Peter Falk playing himself as a former angel - in a larger part that ultimately plays out to diminished returns of enjoyment.

Clocking in at a bloated 146 mins (nearly 20 mins longer than Wings of Desire), Faraway finds room for: Lou Reed, Mikhail Gorbachev, sins of the Nazis revisited upon the current generation, Willem Dafoe in one of his vaguely menacing (as opposed to overtly so) turns as Emit Flesti, a chain of trapeze artists handling dynamite in midair, and much, much more, but never seems to have a handle on what it wants to really do with all these elements.

Viewing this for a third time, I remain admittedly confused about why Cassiel’s fall to Earth is more disastrous to the order of the Universe and Time Itself (wink, wink) than was Damiel’s. Cassiel becomes more easily corrupted by the greed and violence of the no longer divided Berlin but his quick descent into morose self-pity keeps him an emotional arms length from audience sympathy. This renders his apparent redemption during a protracted finale involving hostages on a tugboat, bungee jumping off a bridge, and actual wheels of time, both confusing and uninspiring. Cassiel gets advice directly from Reed at one point, but to no avail. Nick Cave is on the soundtrack once again, singing the title song, but perhaps another concert would have been just the thing.

Faraway, So Close! is also a Chapter Two for U2’s involvement with Wenders. Until the End of the World took its name from their 1991 track off of Achtung Baby, (and was also featured in the film). Wenders once again approached them about providing a song with lyrical and emotional connections to his current project and the result was Stay (Faraway, So Close!), a tune that I think ends up working better as a cinematic poem than the film itself. The mix in the film is heavier than the version on Zooropa but the potent imagery of the lyrics and Bono’s alternately compassionate and condemning intonations remain undiluted.

The closing verse I started the column with shows the obvious ties to the film, but the couplet “ You used to stay in to watch the adverts/You could lip synch to the talk shows” always gets me. It paints a clearer picture of Cassiel’s (and Berlin’s) dilemma than does the film. It also takes me back to the evenings of my childhood when I relied on voices in the night and images on a screen to help me keep time itself at bay.

Next time: “We are thirty seconds away from the worst medical disaster in Danish history!” And barring a miracle, that’s as close as any of us will ever get. A Halloween-themed Chapter Two that promises to be like “ER on acid.”

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