The Angel Who Fell to Earth WINGS OF DESIRE

By RICHARD CORLISS

An angel is someone who listens. In this German movie, two angels -- yes, real angels, with wings and ponytails -- listen keenly to every wounded soul in West Berlin. Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) patrol the city's streets, libraries, offices, homes. Their job is to "observe, collect, testify, preserve," to offer the unseen hand of consolation to lonely old men, restless scholars, frustrated workers, angry wives. All those voices! And everyone asking the same questions: "Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end?" These ontological riddles echo in the angels' ears like a plaintive nursery rhyme from the children under their care.

For the first third of Wim Wenders' long, gorgeous, swoony, dead-serious fairy tale, the voices of today's Berlin rise like the choral symphony of a great city. Then, gradually, a few solo stories can be heard. An old man named Homer (Curt Bois) recalls the days, once upon a time, when a poet had listeners, drawn into a circle; now he has only solitary readers, unable to warm themselves at the long-ago communal campfire of art. A visiting Hollywood actor (Peter Falk) teaches a new friend some primal joys, simple things: "To smoke, have coffee. And if you do it together, it's fantastic!" In a traveling circus, a pretty trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin) chafes at the gaudy "chicken wings" she must wear in her act. As she stares in her mirror and considers the pleasures men take in looking at her, the invisible Damiel caresses her shoulder.

All these creatures are angels, too, Damiel decides, but most important they are human. They can bleed and see colors. They can feel warmth and pain. Damiel wants to enter their world, "if only to hold an apple in my hand." He wants to be able to feel now instead of just observing forever. He wants to say "Ah!" instead of "Amen." He wants to create his own story in his own voice. So he takes the plunge, toward his airborne woman. An angel must fall to earth to fall in love.

In their earlier work, Director Wenders (Paris, Texas) and Novelist Peter Handke (The Left-Handed Woman) have charted some pretty bleak terrain. Here, though, they boldly go where just about everyone has gone before, into the realm of romantic fantasy. You could say this film is It's a Wonderful Life as told by an angel tired of earning his wings. But it's lots else. It's a fable about the search to reconcile knowing with feeling, purity with experience. It's the story of any man shackled by the expectation of perfection and aching to caress the soft curves of domestic danger. It's also a beguiling metaphor for the dilemma of the novelist or filmmaker who, omnipotently, creates his characters and then must let them breathe, misbehave, go their own ways. Who knows what happens next? Nobody, for sure. And that is the risk held out, like an apple in Eden, by life and art.

Wings of Desire works hard to be both an essay and a love story, a mural and an intimate portrait. To savor this film, the viewer must work hard too. But when the artists behind the screen and the angels in the audience meet, it's like a smoke and coffee: fantastic!