All of Wim Wenders' preoccupations were already on display in his early masterpiece "Alice in the Cities"; the road, travel, America, (and American music), alienation, angst. The 'story' is simplicity itself; a German photo-journalist, on an assignment in America, and one which he fails to complete, finds himself saddled with 9 year old Alice after meeting her and her mother as they try to book tickets back to Germany. When the mother abandons the child with him he seems to readily accept the responsibility of looking after her. He is something of a lost soul and in the child, Alice, perhaps he sees a mirror image of himself.
Today the premiss may seem somewhat unlikely yet it fits perfectly into Wenders' skewed vision of the world. He shot in monochrome, (Robby Muller was again DoP), giving it the feel of a documentary and as our hero, Rudiger Vogler is superbly naturalistic as is Yella Rottlander as Alice. They make a great, unsentimental team; the film may owe a debt to American cinema but it's without any of the sickly sentimentality you usually find in American films dealing with 'lost' children. Indeed, everything that happens seems remarkably matter-of-fact but this is a picture of life, not as it's lived, but as Wenders imagines it should be lived; it's both abstract and humanist and it remains one of the finest of all German films.
Today the premiss may seem somewhat unlikely yet it fits perfectly into Wenders' skewed vision of the world. He shot in monochrome, (Robby Muller was again DoP), giving it the feel of a documentary and as our hero, Rudiger Vogler is superbly naturalistic as is Yella Rottlander as Alice. They make a great, unsentimental team; the film may owe a debt to American cinema but it's without any of the sickly sentimentality you usually find in American films dealing with 'lost' children. Indeed, everything that happens seems remarkably matter-of-fact but this is a picture of life, not as it's lived, but as Wenders imagines it should be lived; it's both abstract and humanist and it remains one of the finest of all German films.