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The sports metaphor is clarified in Night Moves ("One side is just losing slower than the other"), Wim Wenders opens and closes on the damp greens of the soccer field. The existential athlete (Arthur Brauss) is introduced adjusting his socks as the ball zips past him, he strolls off the stadium after a row with the referee, end of game and beginning of voyage or vice-versa. His wandering around Vienna leads him to the theater cashier (Erika Pluhar), they ride the elevator at night into a neon-bathed hotel room in a brief Magritte effect. She recounts a dream the next morning, "sometimes a fire-extinguisher is a flamethrower," he strangles her with neither reason nor malice. In contrast to Fassbinder's concurrent crackup (Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?), the rupture is at once murky and sunlit, a most gently slipping psyche. The aftermath of the murder unfolds in bucolic terrain, a border villa run by a former lover (Kai Fischer), less a sanctuary than a tranquil place to wait for the inevitable. "Who gets lost these days?" Clogged with implosive angst, Wenders' Teutonic Meursault is not out of joint with the world but very much an unnervingly blank part of it, emotional dislocation keeps his frenzy masked until a jukebox earful of Morrison's "Gloria" brings it back. Reality is a video replay on a grainy screen, sprinklings of surrealism (ants in the teapot, flies under the pillow), a mute schoolboy drowned in the woods embodies the state of communication. The anti-suspense builds toward a flicker of light behind the protagonist's numb visage, the human condition as the unlucky goalie "in the wrong corner, sitting in a puddle." The alliance with Hawks' Red Line 7000 is explicitly acknowledged, Kitano has a baseball-gangland retelling in Boiling Point. With Libgart Schwarz, Marie Bardischewski, Rosl Dorena, Rüdiger Vogler, and Edda Köchl.
--- Fernando F. Croce |