alice in the cities [d wenders]

1974 seems like a long time ago. We know that's where we are from the opening frames when Rudiger Vogler's bell bottoms hone into view beneath the boardwalk. His character, Phil Winter, dresses like an embodiment of a time which has become the territory of kitsch memorial. There are other hints of the way the world has changed: is that a woman smoking behind the protagonists on the Pan-Am flight from New York to Amsterdam? And the in-car phone used by the policeman on the ferry at the end, a slightly lugubrious plot device in such a free-wheeling film, looks curious and unlikely.

Phil Winter spends the first twenty minutes of the film drifting around the United States, taking photos. He's supposed to be writing an article, but the 'images' swallow him up, as he explains to his editor. In one of the few scenes of the film inveighed with any tension, he visits an old girlfriend in New York, looking for a bed for the night, and she throws him out, telling him he's only there to tell her his stories, and he's only doing this to prove to himself that they might be real, the same reason he's taken the photos. Edda Kochl's remarkable cameo as the 'friend' opens the door to another movie Wenders chose not to write, perhaps like the article that Winter's writing and of which we only catch a glimpse. The unwritten film would be the one in which the lead character's neurasthenia is explored and revealed. (There are hints in the film that Winter is an alter-ego for Wenders himself, not least when an announcement is made at Amsterdam airport for 'Mr Wenders' - and for a moment we in the audience think this must be for Mr Winter. Winter's name also seems like an obvious pun on a psychological state.)

However, Wenders chooses not to go down this route. Instead he explores the margins of Winter's condition. The film may be called Alice in the Cities, but it is really about Winter's sense of alienation and drift. (When he goes to see a Chuck Berry concert, the song Wenders' chooses to use is - Driving along in my automobile/ No particular place to go...) Alice in some ways offers the loner a sense of selfhood which nothing else in the vastness of America or Europe has done. Much as he might complain about being stuck with her, and although he says, on occasion, exasperated, do you not think I've got better things to do? - It's clear that he doesn't. In a mutable world, Phil needs something to hang on to, and Alice offers him a hook.

In this sense then, perhaps, 1974 is not quite as distant as the bell-bottoms would suggest. Part of the success and cachet of Alice in the Cities may well have been, at the time, the modernity it embodied, the way in which it suggested the path the future would follow. The film opens with a shot of a plane, going we know not where. The shot pans down to reveal Winter on the beach, taking polaroids. The film ends with a sweeping helicopter shot, panning from Phil and Alice up over the Rhine (strangely reminiscent of the closing shot of Into the Wild). Since the film was made, we have entered the era of globalisation, expanding migration, ever-increasing rootlessness. The solid houses of the Ruhrgebeit, an old man informs Phil, are being demolished. In their place will be built flats and smaller houses (the like of which my parents' once lived in in Essen).

Which finally leads us to Alice, who is nine when the film takes place, and would be in her early forties now. In constructing the film's narrative, Wenders decided that Phil needed a foil to his blankness, someone to offer shape to a character he was reluctant to excavate beyond the image. (For the first twenty minutes of the film, the character of Phil barely speaks, mainly reading signs in his pidgeon English. We never learn about Winter's past or why he ended up in America or even what kind of articles the journalist usually writes). Besides the effectiveness of having a charismatic child character fronting his film, the beauty of playing Alice against Phil is that it means Phil never has to explain anything. Rather than exploring the character from the inside, we slowly piece his personality together from the outside. This is shown through the way he interacts with his companion, sometimes affectionate, sometimes irritable, always learning more about himself in the process. And the reason he feels so at home with Alice, the child, is that she has so much in common with him. She too enjoys drifting, feels herself to be rootless, has no particular sense of place. As comfortable in New York as Oberhausen, Alice possesses an aura of world weary modernity, which is as pertinent now as it must have seemed then. She's nine years old and she's already seen it all.

Alice in the Cities is a picaresque movie, of detail and incident. The only thing I could remember from my previous viewing of it, two decades ago, was the modernistic Wuppertal transport system. It is neither gripping nor taught. It's a movie with no particular place to go. Which engenders the paradox that it goes all over the place, going nowhere. When we leave Alice and Phil on the train to Munich, it seems unlikely that this will actually prove to be their final destination. Who knows where they eventually ended up.