After the tower

The “Earth of abundance” in the cinema is the artistic ”director of Wim Wenders, even in his current status of a recognized master and living cinema classics, periodically gives out paintings subject to rapid aging. They completely belong to the moment when they were removed, and lose relevance a year or two later. The skill of the creators, of course, remains in the film, but from watching with a delay, there is a feeling that I had read the newspaper the day before yesterday. So is the “earth of abundance”: after its Venetian festival premiere, a little more than a year passed, and the American post -traumatic syndrome of September 11, meaningful in this tape, has not been, to put it mildly, does not seem to be news.

Today's audience turned out to be in order and hardened in the face of a terrorist threat, so that Wender heroes do not have to count on the same degree of sympathy as a couple of years ago. There are two heroes: the elderly uncle Paul and his young niece Lana (a successful duet of an atypical young American Michelle Williams and Pro from the police series John Dilya). He is a sick veteran of Vietnam on his head and a chemical weapon, she is a volunteer who distributes food to the homeless in the night. After the gender, after the attack of terrorists on the twin tower, a sense of danger has become so aggravated that now any face of Arabic nationality seems suspicious to him, especially if Arab, say, is a box in his hands. The veteran-specialist acquired a van with tracking cameras, night vision devices, means of communication and days on end pursues potential fundamentalists in the backyards of Los Angeles.

Well, the believer idealist Lana lived for a long time with her parents-missionaries in Africa or in Palestine. However, seeing how on September 11 the Arab population is not militants, but ordinary citizens - violently rejoiced at the collapse of New York towers, the girl decided to return to the star -broken homeland and understand why this people hate America so much. Work in a charitable organization does not that bring Lan to a clue, but gives a true picture of the life of the poorest social strata. Wenders shows modern trailer towns and homeless people with the same craving for realism with which his colleagues paint the difficult years of great depression. Oh, this sober European view of the inside of the American dream! However, the German director often works in the States and with the reverse side of the splendor of the splendor is well familiar.

In addition, in his picture of the perversion of humanistic and patriotic ideas and the substitution of values are forced to reflect the Americans themselves. And the audience with them. The instructive story proposed by the author is simple: the uncle of the floor during the next surveillance becomes a witness to the murder of a homeless named Hassan and believes that this person is behind the whole organization of bombers. With the relish using all his special forces and army training, he unfolds a whole investigation, while compassionate Lana only wants to find the relatives of the murdered and provide the poor as worthy funeral. Even if for this you will have to drag into a deaf California desert. To the conclusion that not every Hassan is a terrorist, a spectator of the Earth of Reason, of course, much earlier than paranoid sex. However, it is more important that few are ready for an alternative: like Lana, to regret and respect a foreigner humanly as himself as himself.

11.12.2005 / Catherine Chen Material published in the "newspaper" No. 235 dated 12.12.2005.