DER HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN

SOLVEIG DOMMARTIN 1961 - 2007



The sad news has recently reached me of the death of the Franco-German actor Solveig Dommartin. She was struck down by a heart attack in Paris on January 11 at the obscenely young age of 45.



Her acting career began in the theatre in France and Germany. She then worked for a time as an assistant to the director Jacques Rozier (best known for his nouvelle-vague 1962 classic Adieu Philippine) before making her screen debut in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, in which she memorably played the part of the circus acrobat who ensnares the heart of an angel and causes his fall from grace amongst the black and white roofs and skies of Berlin.



Solveig had to learn circus acrobatics and all sorts of trapeze movements in under eight weeks for the film and never used a stunt double. For many people, it is still Wenders' most striking movie and she will ever be remembered for the part.



It was on the set of the film that she began a liaison with Wenders, which was to last several years and led to her co-writing 1991's Until the End of the World, a daring folly of a road movie in which a band of misfits, seekers, secret agents and femmes fatales roamed the globe in a search for the absolute, only to end up in the Australian desert.



Wenders said of the film: "Solveig Dommartin and I had written the story of the film together, and we thought that we only had the right to enter into such a sacred area as a person's dreams if we would bring something into the work that was sacred to ourselves."



The fascinating but flawed movie was heavily cut on its initial release, but also exists in different, longer forms that have been shown at festivals and the NFT, and still has absolutely entrancing moments.



Solveig only had a cameo appearance in Wenders' 1993 Wings sequel, Faraway, So Close and, apart from a role in Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep in 1994, her film career ended together with her relationship with the German director. She directed a 20-min short, Il suffirait d'un pont in 1998, starring Romane Bohringer and Catherine Frot, but had produced nothing since.



I met her for the first time at the Courmayeur Noir in Fest film and literary festival in Italy in December 1993; unlike the demure Marion of the Wenders film, the real-life Solveig was a veritable bundle of energy, a boisterous and extrovert young woman who was always the last to leave the hotel bar. She arrived at the festival straight from a Paris registry office where she had just married Fred, a French busker she'd only known for a few weeks, and promptly began flirting outrageously with most men present, under his bemused gaze.



But there was a basic, joyful innocence in Solveig and her medusa-like mane that quickly banished disapproval. It was thanks to her that my colleague Adrian Wootton managed to arrange a screening at the NFT of the five-or-so-hour version of Until the End of the World a year later, which she presented, with wide-eyed Fred still trailing in her rumbustious wake.



For filmgoers everywhere, she will always be the beauty who enticed an angel down from heaven, but for those of us who knew her, she will be remembered as a hell of a girl.



WINGS OF DESIRE (DER HIMMEL ÜBER BERLIN)

Starring

Bruno Ganz

Solveig Dommartin

Otto Sander

Curt Bois

Peter Falk



Music by

Jürgen Knieper



Release date(s)

23 September 1987



Running time

127 min.



Language

German, English and French



Wings of Desire is the English title of Der Himmel über Berlin (trans. The Sky over Berlin or Heaven over Berlin), a 1987 film by the German- born director Wim Wenders. It was partially inspired by the poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke. Wenders also employed the skills of Peter Handke, who wrote much of the dialogue and the poetic voice-overs.



Plot



Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.



Set in Berlin in the late 1980s, toward the end of the Cold War, it follows two angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander), as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by the people, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of Berliners: a pregnant woman, a painter, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their raison d'etre is not that of the stereotypical angel, but as Cassiel says, to "assemble, testify, preserve" reality. In addition to the story of two angels, the film also is a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Damiel and Cassiel have always existed as angels; they existed in Berlin before it was a city, and in fact before there were even any humans.



Among the Berliners they encounter in their meanderings is an old man named Homer (Curt Bois), who, unlike the Greek poet of war Homer, dreams of an "epic of peace". The angel Cassiel follows the old man as he looks for the Potsdamer Platz in an open field, where all he finds is the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall.



Although Damiel and Cassiel are pure observers, invisible to all but children, and incapable of any physical interaction with our world, one of the angels, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), begins to fall in love with a circus trapeze artist named Marion (Solveig Dommartin), who is talented, lovely, but profoundly lonely. Marion lives alone in a trailer, dances alone to the live music of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and drifts through the city.



A subpart of the film follows Peter Falk, cast as himself, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin's Nazi past. As the movie progresses, it turns out that Peter Falk was also once an angel, who renounced his immortality to become a mortal participant in the world after he grew tired of always observing and never experiencing.



Eventually, Damiel too longs for physicality, and to become human. When he sheds his immortal existence, he experiences life for the first time: he bleeds, sees colors for the first time (the movie before then is filmed in a sepia tinted monochrome, except for brief moments when Damiel is watching Marion), tastes food, drinks coffee. Meanwhile, Cassiel inadvertantly taps into the mind of a young man just before he commits suicide by jumping off a building; Cassiel tries to save the young man but is unable to do so, and he is left haunted and tormented by the experience. Eventually Damiel meets the trapeze artist Marion at a bar, and they greet each other with familiarity as if they had long known each other. In the end, Damiel is united with the woman he had desired for so long.



The story is continued in Wenders' 1993 sequel, In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close!.)