Berlin Cinéma

Why doesn't Wim Wenders lighten up? With a likely Oscar in the wings for his Buena Vista Social Club and a new movie -- The Million Dollar Hotel -- starring Mel Gibson coming up, you'd think he'd at least crack a smile in Samira Gloor Fadel's dour, disconnected documentary Berlin-Cinéma.

One reason might be that most of Wenders's comments about the future of his adopted home town and his vocation come from lectures and conversations that took place around the time of his Until the End of the World (1991), when the director's own future wasn't looking too rosy. Another might be that Gloor Fadel's earnest farrago -- of black-and-white images of Berlin, film clips from Wenders (most notably the under-production Until the End of the World, which doesn't look any more convincing in this context), Fassbinder, and others, plus gnomic utterances from Jean-Luc Godard as well as Wenders's whimsical droning -- doesn't shed much light on either of the film's title topics. Fitfully eloquent -- the stark image of a bombed-out building with placards naming the former residents far outweighs Gloor Fadel's device of a kid on a bicycle reading excerpts from the writings of Fassbinder, Godard, and Wenders -- this sort of exploration was done better in Wenders's own brilliant Tokyo-ga (1985).

-- Peter Keough