Film review by Kevin Patterson
UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD Rating: **1/2 (out of four) R, 1991 Directed by Wim Wenders. Written by Wenders and Peter Carey. Starring Solveig Dommartin, William Hurt, Sam Neill.
Wim Wenders's UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD may be the first 2-1/2 hour film that I thought moved too quickly almost every step of the way. It's about so many different things at once that it ends up having time for none of them: there's a cross-continental spy chase, a romantic triangle, a possible nuclear disaster, and a meditation on technology and human consciousness. I have heard that Wenders originally hoped to make a five- or six-hour film, and it shows: there are traces of choppy editing, characters disappear from the story for half an hour at a time, and important plot and character points are merely glossed over in narration. Conversations barely have time to start in this film: the characters get a few lines, and then it's time to cut to the next scene.
The first hour of the film, for example, follows Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) as she pursues Sam Farber (William Hurt), whom she met in an airport, to various cities all over the world. There is clearly some attraction between them, but he still seems wary of her presence and fears that she might make things more dangerous, as he is clearly fleeing someone important, and ditches her on more than one occasion. Still she continues, undiscouraged. Perhaps Wenders wanted this to be some sort of great odyssey, but all we ever see is a series of scenes in airports and hotels. There's no time for the relationship between the two to develop, or for Claire to consider why she keeps following him, because Wenders has to send them gallavanting across the globe again before too long.
Aside from being rather unsuspenseful and repetitive, this portion of the movie doesn't help us to relate to or understand the characters, because it makes Sam seem very self-centered and unlikeable and makes Claire look like a bit of an airhead at the very least. Adding to the muddle is Claire's boyfriend (?) Gene (Sam Neill), who shows up to help her, apparently unfazed that she's trying to run off with another man. I could understand that perhaps he really loves her and figures this is what will make her happy, but there seems to be absolutely *no* tension between the two of them over this. "I don't think you quite understand the nature of our relationship," Gene says to a puzzled private detective at one point; I imagine the detective could keep company with most of the audience on that one.
UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD does eventually take a turn for the better. Claire has caught up with Sam (again), and he reveals to her that he has been on the run from the U.S. government, trying to keep them from getting hold of his new invention: a camera which records another person's visual sense-data in a way that it can be transmitted to his blind mother. Claire joins him on his flight from the authorities as the two continue to travel the world, taking turns recording sights for his mother. Finally they wind up in a remote area of Australia when several nuclear satellites accidentally explode, rendering all communications dead and leaving them to wonder if anyone else is left alive.
Eventually they make their way to a desert shelter, where they are joined by Gene and a bounty hunter, both of whom had been on Sam's trail. There they also find Sam's family, and an old conflict reignites between Sam and his father, whom he thinks is ungrateful for all the effort he has made for his mother. Meanwhile, the camera isn't the miracle Sam had hoped for. His mother is mostly startled by how bleak and ugly the world seems compared to when she had last been able to see, at age eight, and others, including Claire, start using it to record their own dreams and soon become addicted to watching their own mental images on-screen.
If this review seems to be jumping all over the place, that's partly because the film does as well. But UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD is hardly a disaster. Wenders has a distinct, poetic style of direction, and the scenes in which he captures the characters' isolation when they think the rest of the human population may have been wiped out are outstanding. The post-apocalyptic element and the issues raised by the invention of the camera were both fascinating, and in fact each of them probably could have made for an entire movie all by themselves. Unfortunately, the compressed pace of the film still allows for only cursory examinations of each.
Given that he was apparently limited to a shorter release than he wanted, Wenders might well have done better to focus on just one or two of these story elements. The spy chase in particular feels like dead weight, though perhaps it would have led into the rest of the film more easily in its uncut version. I guess Wenders had an epic in mind, but at best he ends up with an outline for an epic, full of underdeveloped ideas and characters. Still, it seemed like an outline for a pretty good epic, and hopefully the director's cut will eventually gain commercial release.
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