Until the End of the World Reviews

This is taken from my 2007 review of the German Extended Edition. Original formatting can be found here; www.chud.com/12030/dvd-review-until-the-end-of-the-world-region-2/

1999, the future. A satellite hangs in Earth’s orbit, slowly descending and promising to set off an apocalyptic chain of events. Claire Tourneur (Dommartin) couldn’t care less about the imminent destruction of the world. All she cares about is losing herself in parties following an infidelity by her novelist boyfriend Eugene Fitzpatrick (Neil).

A curious series of serendipities allows her to meet Sam Farber (Hurt), an enigmatic American travelling across Europe on an unknowable mission. Rapt by this stranger and aided by Fitzpatrick and a kind hearted Detective (Vogler), Claire begins a pursuit which will take her across the soon to be extinguished world.

I love the term Curate’s Egg. It’s a lovely little Victorian phrase which perfectly sums up Until The End Of The World with minimum fuss. What’s excellent is that the quaintness of the term makes it even more apt as a descriptor for a film that is at best a dazzling curio and at worst a supreme failure. At its core the film is an oxymoron, Wim Wender’s arthouse sensibilities tied to a film which has the scope of a blockbuster. The results are interesting to say the least; at times it’s grandiose and introverted, old-fashioned and permissive, the merger of antiquated Hollywood ideals with an indie ethos.

Originally released in 1991 as a concise, confusing, and despairingly odd three hour epic, Until The End Of The World never really set box offices alight. A three hour long science fiction odyssey by the director best known for his film about mopey angels in Berlin unsurprisingly failed to capture the public interest. Armed with hours of unused footage Wenders’ started work on his Director’s Cut of the film. Spanning three discs and turning the film into a trilogy of smaller films the Director’s Cut of Until The End Of The World is in some areas a marked improvement. Given that the film is split into three separate instalments I’m going to review each disc as if they were individual parts of a trilogy.

Disc 1

Largely concerned with the pursuit of Sam Farber across a futuristic Europe, Disc 1 seeks to set up the world and characters of Until The End Of The World. The first thing that becomes apparent is that Wender’s vision of the future isn’t routed in a traditional reality. The technology on show is fairly astute, Wender’s vision of the future being fairly conservative in terms of how far science would have advanced. However despite the scientific fidelity, the tone of the film is so removed from reality that it almost becomes a fairytale.

Despite the apocalyptic title and opening narration, Until The End Of The World is a massively optimistic and sweet natured film. It may be disingenuous to attribute this optimistic tone to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I’d hate to make that assumption just based on Wender’s nationality, but there is definitely something fuelling the frivolous and happy aspects of the film.

Wim Wenders’ vision of the future is rooted in the cinema of Hollywood’s Golden Age; whilst other similar science fiction films used Noir trappings against their hard edged dystopia Until The End Of The World embraces both the style and sense of fun of Golden Age filmmaking. Despite a more permissive attitude towards sex the film feels like it could easily have been made in the late 40s or 50s.

The film seems to exist in a particularly skewed version of reality, the kind of magical cinematic place where films like Amelie take place. There’s a charming, pleasantness to the whole film which at first is a little hard to get used to. Everyone is so genial and polite and whimsical and fun that the film becomes almost infectiously fun as you watch it. Characters like the Detective Winters are given very little to do, but manage to charm their way into being genuinely likeable characters.

With an antagonist who seems to be there purely for a few comic set pieces, the films entire narrative thrust revolves around Claire’s chase of Farber, a chase facilitated by her doting ex-boyfriend and the wide range of eccentrics she meets along the way.

What Wenders’ brings to the equation as a director is an eye for scenery and an ability to convey the entire feel and tone of a city through a small number of shots. Despite barely stopping for breath in any locale the film still feels like a travelogue at times, Wenders’ cinematic vision making you yearn to visit the locations shown. Indeed it’s when Wenders is content to let the film breathe that it becomes a great piece of cinema. One of the elements that damages the film is Wenders’ eagerness to cram in ‘futuristic’ songs from then contemporary acts into the movie.

Whilst this is sometimes effective, but a lot of the time it’s just galling as the familiarity just threatens to bring reality into a film which works upon pure suspension of disbelief. Certain songs propel the narrative and help the fidelity of the world, but all too often you recognise an artist and it pulls you out of the reality of the film.

There are two elements which really bring down the first part of the trilogy, the first being that in a world of pleasant and charmingly odd people the two lead characters are quite unremittingly vile, self centred and, for lack of a better word, real. Claire is an airy, destructive character, drifting around the world for selfish reasons. Sam Farber isn’t given much characterisation; his enigmatic status ensures this, but his actions are all about his own self perseveration.

Claire’s character flaws are largely to do with Solveig Dommartin’s limitations as an actress. There are other characters in the film that are as bad as Claire, but Dommartin seems incapable of generating the kind of charm and desirability the role needs. Claire as a character needs to be enrapturing, a free spirit who engulfs the worlds of those around her, but she comes across more as a stroppy and insensitive diva, hurting the person closest to her in order to meet the love of her life.

The fact the story is told from the perspective of her jilted lover doesn’t really help endear her to the audience, despite Fitzpatrick’s assertions of Claire’s general loveliness there really is nothing for the audience to base it on.

In essence Disc 1 functions as a travelogue, a way for Wenders’ to explore his new world. Whilst this is all very lovely it does shift Wenders’ focus away from his characters and as such the two leads are never particularly fleshed out, their motivations remain esoteric and nebulous.

Also distracting is the way that the quality of the film seems to change depending on the location, there are noticeably different types of film stock used at different points of the film, the image quality degrading and improving as they move from country to country. It settles down as the film goes on, but it’s yet another element which takes the viewer out of the movie. Throw in some odd audio work (some sections seem to have really poor audio dubbing and synching for some strange reasons) that is often changing and the fidelity of the world is under jeopardy.

Somehow Wenders’ keeps this all together and manages to maintain a charm that subtly smoothes over any technical cracks in the film. The same can unfortunately not be said for Disc 2.

Disc 2

Whereas Disc 1 works as a kind of science fiction fairytale, a charming piece of lovable oddness, Disc 2 tries to bring a darker and sadder tilt to the story and nearly derails the entire movie in doing so.

The second part of Until The End Of The World is ludicrously awful, the jaunty globetrotting of Disc 1 replaced by a bleak stay in America and a trip through the bleakest wastes of Australia.

With Claire having caught up with the now blinded Sam, the plot revolves around the two of them racing against anonymous opposition to complete the last part of Sam’s mission.

An odd thing happens to Claire as well; her character is written as being suddenly obedient. Her chase across the world purely to become subservient to a man she barely knows. The entire film hangs on her quest for a purpose in life, but Disc 2 reveals that this purpose is for her to dote on the love of her life like some 50s housewife.

Disc 2 also has none of the ethereal grace of Disc 1, the dreamlike quality of the first part replaced by a more strikingly realistic take on the world. The fairytale quality subsiding to the point where suspension of disbelief is pushed to breaking point.

In Disc 1 the viewer goes along with ideas and notions because it makes sense in the grander scheme of the film, the foibles of the characters explained away by the dreamy way the film is shot.

Bringing a harsher view of reality into the film, if only for a few scenes, destroys this suspension of disbelief and suddenly ideas which would have worked in Disc 1 become patently ridiculous in Disc 2.

A great example of this happens around halfway through the second disc. Claire gets herself handcuffed to a plane by a bounty hunter. The bounty hunter is promptly captured and tied up. After this Sam and Claire set off in the plane and crash in the middle of the Australian desert. For whatever reason Claire is still handcuffed to the plane door, this is a massive piece of contrivance considering the plane was in the middle of a garage, which surely should have had something which could break the chain of a pair of handcuffs, and the bounty hunter is later shown to have the keys.

This means that we get lots of interesting and iconic shots of Claire walking through the desert whilst still handcuffed to the detached plane door, the call back to Paris/Texas being appreciated. But the shots aren’t earned because there is no logical reason why Claire would still be wearing the handcuffs.

These problems of contrivance plague the second half and start to give the impression that Wenders is rushing through to try and get to the end section. Certainly when Claire gets arrested for nebulous reasons, apparently being nice to children is utterly criminal in San Francisco, you start to lose patience with the film.

And if you have any patience left, then Wenders makes sure to sap it by having an irritating minor character from the 1st Disc become a full blown sidekick in Disc 2. The French Bank Robber becomes easily the most annoying character in the film, his constant prattling and buffoonery becoming so irritating that you start to wish a harsh and painful death upon him. To compound the problem Claire is shown to be greatly amused at all times by the character, which just makes her even less sympathetic to the audience.

The sense of desperate forward momentum is what ruins Disc 2, with Farber’s motivations now in the open it becomes clear that Wenders is more intent on getting to the finale than anything else. Consequently the entire second disc, aside from a few moments here and there, just feels like an afterthought, the only thing holding it together being Sam Neil’s narration.

Disc 3

After chasing halfway across the world, dragging a plane door across a desert and surviving the nuclear apocalypse Claire and Sam finally get to the point of the film. Well actually that’s a lie; the point of the film is broached, inexplicably, in the last ten minutes of Disc 2.

We know that Sam was travelling across the globe to collect images for a machine of his father’s that will let his blind mother see her family, we know that the main reason for his doing this was to impress his dad, and we know that his dad isn’t all that impressed anyways.

As opposed to the continually shifting locales of Disc 1 and 2, Disc 3 is set in and around a laboratory set into an Australian cave system. Following the destruction of a nuclear satellite in orbit, a ragtag band of survivors have trekked across Australia to this installation. This fixed location serves the third disc fantastically well as the focus switches to a more character based perspective.

The main plot of the 3rd Disc is hardly something to get excited about; anyone who’s seen a film about a dedicated scientist ignoring the one he lives whilst he tries to cure their ailment is going to know exactly what’s going to happen. It’s the periphery stuff which initially keeps the film interesting.

Bringing a large chunk of the cast together allows the film to look at the way people deal with the potential apocalypse they’ve survived. Heading back to the sweet nature of the first disc, the film decides that people would deal with this by forming an impromptu band. Thus every ten minutes or so we get a performance from an ever expanding musical group, the didactic pop songs replaced by didactic ‘whatever genre a didgeridoo, harmonica and piano combination belongs to’ songs.

So whilst we have Max Von Sydow making William Hurt act like an angsty teen inside the cave, outside Sam Neil is having the time of his life playing the piano and writing a new novel. It’s a really bizarre tonal discrepancy and makes the stuff inside the cave seem even more flippant, especially when people start to gain moral concerns purely because the script demands that they start worrying about stuff they’ve been doing quite happily for four years.

What’s fascinating about the 3rd Disc is the lack of focus that Wenders shows, and the fact that the film essentially becomes a four act movie. The third act of the movie finishes roughly thirty minutes into the 3rd Disc, but a new narrative suddenly emerges which is completely out of leftfield.

The sudden delve into the recording of dreams and the psychosis that it creates in three of the main characters is as weird as it is unexpected and it’s hard to judge if the entire intent of the film is to get to this moment, or if Wenders is trying to incorporate a tertiary failed idea into a film which is already bloated with ideas. It’s certainly interesting stuff, but it doesn’t gel with the rest of the film and the narrative climax requires viewers to draw upon a deep well of empathy for Claire which just doesn’t exist.

It’s hard to rate Until The End Of The World. The text of my review makes it sound like I hate the movie and that is far from the truth. I have a great deal of time for the film and I think the spirit and charm of the film are enthralling. It’s just that for everything it does right it also does something wrong. The director’s cut helps flesh out events and ideas and gives peripheral characters a lot more to do, but there’s still something innately wrong with the relationship between the lead characters.