FARAWAY, SO CLOSE (Directed by Wim Wenders. Starring Otto Sander, Peter Falk, Nastassja Kinski, Willem Dafoe)

The U2 song was written for the film and not the other way around, though Wim Wender’s follow up to Wings Of Desire has taken so long to emerge the title already seems to be trading on a golden oldie. And it is not only the song that now seems second hand. With Wings, Wenders came up with such a fabulous cinematic concept it is hard to criticise him for wanting to re-use it, but the original is such a masterpiece the sequel almost inevitably suffers by comparison.

Faraway So Close revisits Berlin as seen through the eyes of angels, wandering the earth listening to people’s thoughts and subtly influencing them. It is a device that allows the film-maker to peel away the external and reveal the interior, but the jumble of internal voices and dreamy everyday imagery has been so imitated in advertising and music videos (REM’S ‘Everybody Hurts’ springs to mind, although there have been others) that it looks well-worn where the original was sublime. And while the first film had a powerful romance to alleviate the crushing depiction of human suffering, the follow up concentrates on intrigue, building a tale of gun-running and heists into the spiritual dilemma. Battling a possibly demonic enemy (Willem Dafoe) the angel (Otto Sander, Bruno Ganz’s heavenly partner in Wings) gets dragged into an espionage set up that is more Get Smart than John Le Carre, complete chase scenes and big action set pieces delivered like send ups of American cinema.

There are peculiar cameos from Lou Reed and even Mikhail Gorbachev, a repeat performance from Peter Falk as the fallen angel, and a welcome cinematic return for Nastassja Kinski as a vision of beauty (what else)? Shifting between black and white and luminous, washed out colour, Wenders again creates images of transcendent beauty and succeeds in incorporating concepts like faith, goodness and grace into his wild narrative. Out of all this Wender’s creates moments as good as anything he has ever done, which is saying a lot, but the confused plot (suffering from over an hour of cuts to get it into some kind of releasable form) and sense of repetition ensures it is never more than a shadow of its illustrious predecessor.