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Rating: In my opinion, it would be unfair to review a film like "Until the End of the World" without recounting its troubled production history. I therefore apologize in advance for the length of this piece, which will also try to be a tribute to this 158 or 280-minute film…
The year is 1989, and, bolstered by the critical and commercial success of his two recent films "Paris, Texas" (1984) and "Wings of Desire" (1987), Wim Wenders finally manages to secure funding for his new film, "Until the End of the World." This is a project that the director has pursued since the mid-'70s when he first encountered the red Australian desert and found it to be the perfect location for a hypothetical science fiction film.
Cinematic science fiction, as we know, is costly, so the project remains in limbo for many years because Wenders has only developed rough plot outlines, not a full screenplay. The meeting with the late Solveig Dommartin (1961-2007), the unforgettable trapeze artist/angel from "Wings of Desire" and his partner at the time, untangles the story (the actress is even credited as a scriptwriter alongside Wenders and Peter Carey). Thanks to a finally structured story to propose to production houses and the success previously mentioned, the German director secures a substantial budget of 23 million dollars—a considerable sum at the time (and still today) especially for an "auteur film."
At that point, all cinephiles are on edge, not only because when a great director has met the science fiction genre in the past, it often resulted in a masterpiece (see Lang, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Siegel, Truffaut, Godard, Scott, Carpenter, Spielberg, and allow me also Lynch—I still find Dune fascinating), but also because an international cast is announced, led by William Hurt (much in demand at the time), alongside none other than Max von Sydow, Jeanne Moreau, Sam Neill, the same Dommartin, and Rüdiger Vogler reprising his iconic role for Wenders fans as Philip Winter. Behind the camera is another loyal collaborator, Dutchman Robbie Müller, whose work always promises high-level visual quality. Another point of interest is that the film will feature footage shot on both film and high-definition video, which was pioneering cinema at the time.
Wenders does not stop there; he contacts 18 of his favorite artists/bands, asking them to create a track for the soundtrack (for a film that has not yet been shot), projecting 10 years into the future as the story is set in the last months of 1999. Wenders expects 5 or 6 will respond; instead, he receives 17 tracks, later attributing the epic length of his feature to this unexpected response.
Yes, because it soon becomes clear that the length of the film will be a problem for distribution. The shoot starts in Venice, then moves to Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Tokyo, San Francisco, and naturally the Australian desert. Wenders compulsively shoots an enormous amount of footage, and the financiers start to worry; the 23 million are no longer sufficient, and they decide to "turn off the taps," forcing Wenders to simulate Moscow interiors in Portugal and send the diligent Dommartin with a small camera to film exteriors in Beijing, another location planned in the plot. The screenplay also called for moving to Africa to film a tribe of Pygmies, but this is something the German director is completely forced to forgo.
Despite these restrictions, the first cut of the film lasts 20 hours and, by Wenders' own admission, is unpresentable. He works on a version about 280 minutes long, but the distributors refuse to consider it, so the director is forced to cut his work by another 2 hours to make it 158 minutes long, which is the maximum length allowed. It finally releases in theaters in this version in 1991.
The excitement fades. There's a sense that the mountain has labored to bring forth a mouse: a very tepid reception, harsh criticism of the director and Dommartin’s performance, disappointment among cinephiles even though the film is acknowledged to have a certain charm (and I found myself here), an inevitable commercial flop, so much so that the soundtrack, despite the various tracks being heard in snippets of seconds and nothing more, ends up earning more than the film.
No matter how complex, the plot can be summarized as follows (SPOILER ALERT):
Sam Farber (Hurt) travels from one end of the world to the other, recording local life sounds, and images, and his family using a heavy hi-tech visor. He meets Claire (Dommartin) during his travels, who falls head over heels in love with him and decides to follow him from one metropolis to another, even though Sam does everything to cover his tracks. Meanwhile, Claire is followed by her ex-partner Eugene (Neill), who tries to rekindle their relationship and gets help in his search from detective Winter (Vogler). Soon, it becomes apparent that Sam's visor can record the visual impulses sent by the optic nerve to the cerebral cortex and that his odyssey is justified by his need to collect images and messages meant to be "seen" by his mother, who is blind, Edith (Moreau), via a complex neurological interfacing system developed by Sam's father, Henry (von Sydow). The hitch is that Henry has practically stolen the project and prototypes from the team he collaborated with in the United States, leading him to hide! In the depths of the Australian desert to continue his research in an underground lab using the aborigines as aides and actual guinea pigs, along with his wife. Meanwhile, an Indian nuclear satellite threatens to explode in orbit due to a malfunction, prompting fears of "the end of the world" (it's 1999 after all).
Once the mission and Sam's elusiveness are revealed, Claire stays by her beloved’s side until their return to Australia with all the recorded material; Eugene, Winter, and a bounty hunter follow, all trapped there because the satellite explodes in the meantime and all electronic devices, except those in Henry's cave, stop working.
Finally, the experiment is complete, with Sam’s visions transferred to his mother’s cerebral cortex, allowing her to "see" again, to everyone's great emotion. But Henry is not satisfied yet, and his scientist’s ambition leads him to attempt to record brain impulses generated by dreams so he can later visualize them as films. However, this brings a devastating psychological impact on the protagonists.
(END SPOILER)
The film thus presents itself as a repository of all Wenders' then-obsessions, old (the journey as personal growth, unresolved family relationships) and new (the risks of massive image creation, a theme that will become central in many of his subsequent films). But everything seems hurried, "rushed," characters appear and disappear without clear logic, cities are hard to distinguish and follow one another seemingly without reason, and the Australian part, while visually fascinating, is quite confusing.
Fortunately, still having access to the original negative, Wenders continues to work on his 280-minute version and completes it after about a year, occasionally presenting it at special events at festivals and university conferences in the United States. Apart from these "legendary" occasions, the director’s cut remains practically invisible to the general public.
Finally, in 2003, the long version is released on a triple DVD in Germany, France, and incredibly also in Italy thanks to Ripley Home Video. Some call it a masterpiece, others shrug it off and prefer to overlook it since, after all, it’s the director’s cut of a science fiction film released in theaters more than 10 years earlier and now paradoxically set in the past.
Yet the additional two hours, as one might guess, offer a much more rewarding cinematic experience. Sure, the fundamental plot elements remain unchanged, although interesting and delightful subtexts emerge, but it becomes clear that this is precisely what Wenders was forced to do in the "short" version, namely to confine himself to telling the main events, cutting out everything that was actually the soul, the breath of the film.
In the director's cut, the characters are more clearly delineated in personality and motivation, the plot is more understandable, and the musical tracks often blend with the images to create moments of great suggestion, especially in the Australian part, although in my opinion, the most commendable work is done by the compositions of Graeme Revell.
Now appearing less “haphazard” is the space given to the still-hypnotic and fascinating "stolen" dream images, shot precisely in HD to be digitally manipulated later, manipulations that today each of us could accomplish in a few minutes on our laptops and which took Wenders (nearly thirty years ago) long weeks of work with Sean Naughton and a team of Japanese technicians (here, however, it is not the technique that counts but the author’s imaginative capacity).
Certainly, some perplexities may remain. The wandering to various ends of the world in the first two hours, as intriguing as it is, can still appear somewhat gratuitous and not always so necessary to the advancement of the plot. It doesn't help that the central figure in this first part is Claire, the Dommartin character who proves to be a still somewhat raw interpreter for the difficult task entrusted to her, although she is particularly effective and amusing when put under Pentothal, twice (!).
In contrast, the second part brings to the fore the dysfunctional family portrayed by Hurt, von Sydow, and Moreau, and the result is truly remarkable, reverberating on all the other actors.
Finally, if Wenders' future was wrong in imagining that in 1999 we would all communicate via FIXED videophones, it is wonderfully prescient in showing cars equipped with navigation systems very similar to modern ones and the everyday use of cards for the wide range of operations, from payments to identification procedures to the storage and transport of files (including music).
Today’s viewers can hardly fail to be struck by the visual obsession that at some point grips the protagonists, whom we see bent over for days and days with their eyes fixed on little mobile devices they always carry with them; in this respect, regarding smartphones, the film is prescient.
At the time of the director’s cut release, Wenders stated that the film’s inspiration mainly stemmed from his fears about the impact a continuous and massified production of audiovisual images would have on all our psyches, later saying he reconsidered, believing that we somehow managed to metabolize that wave. With today’s advent of social networks and the compulsivity they tend to induce in many of us, I don't know if good Wim is still willing to reconsider, but I, who am indeed proposing a review on a social network by partly tapping it out on a smartphone, am certainly not the best person to express a judgment in this regard.
Enjoy the film.
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