UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991) - Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Wim Wenders' "Until the End of the World" is a fascinating, fractured, disconnected mess of a movie. Watching it recently for the second time, I found it less enthralling than I had initially. It is like watching a trailer for a film that is not quite complete.
It is the year 1999 and an Indian nuclear satellite has spun out of control causing great alarm around the world. Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin), an adventurous partygoer, could care less about a potential nuclear crisis. She loves to sleep endlessly and listen to rock and roll music, especially Elvis's "Summer Kisses, Winter Tears" (also sung in the film by David Lynch regular Julee Cruise). While traveling back home, Claire finds herself iadvertently involved with two bank robbers, a traveler wearing a fedora hat named Trevor Mcphee (William Hurt), who is being hunted by the government, a bounty hunter, and so on. This all takes them to a spiritual habitat in the Australian Outback where Farber's father, a crotchety scientist (Max Von Sydow), lives with his blind wife (Jeanne Moreau).
I do not wish to reveal much more of the film except to say that the first half is brilliant moviemaking, exploring a world inhabited by videophones, digital video cameras, headsets that can record images, tracking devices, all told in an almost noirish, Godardian landscape (in fact, both Dommartin and Hurt seem to be doing variations on the characters in Godard's "Breathless" and "Pierrot le Fou.") Most of what the film shows has become a reality today in the year 2000, though videophones never took off. The ability to trace anyone anywhere is also a real possibility, even on the Internet.
Once the characters settle in Australia, the film loses its urgency and potency. Basically, we are left with endless shots of people strapped to chairs while enduring dream hypnosis and other sleep-inducing phenomena so that a new kind of camera can record and visualize people's dreams. The characters in this section of the film become less interesting as well. Why the hell does Claire follow the listless Farber all around the world? Does she truly love him or does she want the money he stole from her? I think it may have been a mistake to show a femme fatale with a compassionate, sweet aura - the transition is simply not there and thus not believable. Dommartin seems to be playing the same angelic, melancholy character she played in Wenders' "Wings of Desire." Characters such as the devious bounty hunter, the sloppy government agent, the whimsical bank robbers, and Claire's boring boyfriend, an author (Sam Neill, who also narrates the film) all become ciphers literally kept in the background.
Every sequence set in Australia feels disconnected and rushed, though the soundtrack and the sight of seeing the towering presences of Max Von Sydow and Jeanne Moreau keeps one glued as to what happens next. It all sort of feels choppy and not edited with smooth transitions from one scene to the next. The reason may be that Wim Wenders initially had a longer cut, reportedly five hours long and shown briefly at a university in 1996. I wait for the day when this cut becomes available and shown in cinema screens. Heck, if they did it for "Das Boot" and "The Last Emperor," they can do it for Wenders' film.
Despite the flaws and narrative inconsistencies, "Until the End of the World" is brave, original, risky, full of ambitious ideas, and often a sight to behold (including the innovative use, at the time, of high-definition television). It is often compelling and moving enough to make one wish it were better. I am sure the longer, director's cut is the great film that this truncated version aspires to be.
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