Alice in the Cities (1974)
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Review #1,388 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Wim Wenders
Cast: Yella Rottländer, Rüdiger Vogler, Lisa Kreuzer
Plot: A German journalist is saddled with a nine-year-old girl after encountering her mother at a New York airport.
Genre: Drama
Awards: -
Runtime: 110min
Rating: PG
International Sales: HanWay Films
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
Wim Wenders, one of the trailblazers of the New
German Cinema in the 1970s, broke out as a filmmaker of promising repute with
his fourth feature, Alice in the Cities. Now regarded as one of three films that make
up his early ‘Road Trilogy’ (the other two films are Wrong Move (1975) and Kings
of the Road (1976)), Alice in the
Cities sees the then emerging independent filmmaker charting his path,
quite literally, via the modality that is the ‘road movie’.
It is shot in 16mm by Robby Muller, who rose to
fame together with Wenders, with their artistic collaboration cumulating in
perhaps their magnum opus, Paris, Texas (1984). Muller would later work with such greats as
Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier.
We are introduced to Philip Winter (Rudiger
Vogler), a German journalist on a road trip at the heart of New York trying to
capture the elusive essence of Americana.
He takes plenty of polaroid, obsessed with how the images don’t often
correspond to what he actually sees. He
doesn’t have the inspiration to write—to the chagrin of his editor—and decides
to return to Germany.
Before the trip, he has a chance encounter with
a German mother and her nine-year old daughter.
By a stroke of fate, he’s left with Alice the young girl, whom he takes
on a poetic journey to find her grandmother’s old house back in their home
country.
Alice in
the Cities is
a film of two halves—we see the sights and sounds of New York, and then
Germany. As they are transiting in
Amsterdam, we catch a glimpse of the landscape as well, no doubt represented by
a solitary windmill. It is a picturesque
film that pits the self-centered Philip against the maturing Alice.
One might have believed at the start that the
movie is about Philip, when it is actually about Alice. Wenders’ deft hand at crafting a picture that
gives voice to a young female who discovers herself as a person of strength and
wholeness is one of cinema’s most empathetic and honest portrayals of a girl’s
inner emotions and her experience on the road.
A sequence that sums up the film's existential
search for meaning from the vantage point of a child is an indelible one—Alice
sits alone in a boutique cafe, licking her ice-cream (Philip is in the
washroom). She sees a lonely boy, also
with an ice-cream, slouching against a jukebox playing ‘On the Road Again’ by
Canned Heat, half-knowing the lyrics and humming to it. It could have been a scene out of a Jarmusch
film.
Together with the melancholic and minimalist Japanese-flavoured
guitar music by Can, a German experimental rock band, Alice in the Cities is a
film that continues to fascinate, even more than forty years later.
Verdict: Wenders’ breakthrough film is a poetic
journey of self-discovery for a young girl and an older man through the
landscape of America and Germany, shot in 16mm with a tinge of melancholic
naturalism.
GRADE: A-
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