Date with an Angel, Take Two

By RICHARD CORLISS

The three rules of movie sequels:

1) If the original movie is really special to you, the filmmaker, don't make it over. A sequel is essentially a commercial venture, designed to extend a product's shelf life. Not wanting to taint the memory of their most personal films, Steven Spielberg left E.T. alone, and Frank Capra refrained from making Son of a Wonderful Life. But Wim Wenders felt no such scruples about redoing Wings of Desire, the 1987 philosophic fantasy that is his masterpiece. This try-everything director correctly saw Wings as an open-ended excuse for considering the changing state of his native Germany. So here, with no apologies, is the fascinating sequel: Faraway, So Close!, or Wings 2.

2) Bring back the old stars and add a big new one. Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander are back as Damiel and Cassiel, the angels come to Earth. Peter Falk returns as an ex-angel, and Solveig Dommartin as the trapeze artist who'll meet any heavenly body halfway. But here's a casting coup: Mikhail Gorbachev as himself. He sits at a desk, pondering the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe. "I'm sure that a secure world can't be built on blood, only on harmony," opines the former Soviet leader, now available for smaller roles. "If we can only agree on this, we will solve the rest."

3) Don't elaborate on the original film's story; instead, remake it. Rocky < always fought a guy; Indiana Jones saved yet another buried treasure; the Lethal Weapon lads kept blowing stuff up. Here Cassiel, the second angel, follows Damiel's lead and becomes human, a brand-new Candide. But Wenders actually has a new idea, courtesy of recent history. In Wings of Desire, two angels hovered over divided Berlin, invisibly consoling its citizens. In the sequel, written by Wenders, Ulrich Zieger and Richard Reitinger, angels patrol a Berlin that is politically united but even more fractious -- a city of gangsters and gun runners, of the homeless and spiritually helpless. Wayne's World 2 this ain't.

What is the same in both Wenders films is the notion of angels as bestowers of grace on a secular landscape. Wenders' view is traditional and strangely powerful. He sees angels as invisible consolers, gentle kibitzers in the monologues that run endlessly through our mind. They are the eternal observers, God's night watchmen, holy voyeurs. Wenders would probably say they are moviegoers, eavesdropping for a few privileged hours on a world more perilous and beautiful than our own. In a lovely scene, Cassiel comforts an old chauffeur (Heinz Ruhmann, a German movie star since 1926) with memories of his childhood. The angel's knowledge validates these reveries, brings the faraway into reassuring emotional close-up.

There is folly aplenty here: klutzy drug lords, nattering detectives, angels on bungee cords. Oh, and Willem Dafoe as a death figure named Emit Flesti -- which makes sense only when spelled backward, and then not nearly enough. But Wenders has always worked on the wild side; even his previous film, the botched Until the End of the World, was a misstep so grand and elaborate it was like a clown's jig on a high wire. In Faraway, So Close! the dance lasts almost until the end of the film. And for those two hours it seems almost seraphic.