A German recreating America in the 1600s while filming in Spain can't help but court dislocation, and so it goes with Wim Wenders' Hawthorne adaptation, the nation of the artist's obsessions centuries before jukeboxes and gas stations. From the start, an outsider's perspective -- Roger Chillingworth (Hans Christian Blech) returning to Salem after a sojourn with the natives, arriving midway through the narrative, wife Hester Prynne (Santa Berger) already donning the "A"-for-hoochie on her breast, refusing to uncover the father of her illegitimate child while Reverend Dimmesdale (Lou Castel), the culprit, falls to his knees in spiritual agony at the outdoors trial. Wenders swore off period pieces as a result of his unhappiness with the production, though his misery may have less to do with the epoch than with Hawthorne's pinned-down intractability giving little elbow room for his beloved exploratory ad-libbing. Less elemental than Sjöström's, yet sandy Spain doubles as America no less intriguingly for Wenders than it did for Leone, and, indeed, the burg suggests a '50s Western hamlet, maybe Johnny Guitar's, where Hester's pariahdom finds unexplored sisterhood solace in Yelena Samarina, the governor's daughter and home-incarcerated "witch," sporting daddy's judicial wig as she tries to set herself on fire. "Liberty is the worst enemy of truth and peace in our settlement," Dimmersdale intones at the chapel while tiny daughter Pearl (Yella Rottländer) sneaks out for some air -- new hope in a new land despite the old laws? The weight of guilt proves too much to the reverend, who turns the pulpit into a confessional and gets promptly dispatched as evidence against a puritanical patriarchy; back in the beach, meanwhile, Hester and Pearl are to sail away to new beginnings, helped, significantly, by Rüdiger Vogler, Wenders' '70s gentle traveler, ready to take Rottländer to modern times and Alice in the Cities. Cinematography by Robby Müller. With William Layton, Ángel Álvarez, and Alfredo Mayo.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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