Time does not always work in favor of movies. The second film I saw in Wim Wenders' retrospective at the local cinematheque was' Wrong Move' (the original title in German is' Falsche Bewegung'), which belongs to the cycle of three 'road movies' created by the director at the beginning of his career in the 1970s. It's one of those cases where as a film lover you can recognize many of the cultural ideas and landmarks on which the film is based and you can identify signs of the director's subsequent evolution. However, there is a lack of vibration and even of a great deal of interest, since the problems of post-war Germany are largely out of date and the style of dialogues combining existentialism with Goethe's writing experiences does not resonate in any way for the viewers of today.
Those who read Goethe know that Wilhelm Meister is the hero one of his novels in which the hero, a young writer in the making, crosses the future of Germany from north to south on a journey of intellectual initiation and self-discovery, trying to find the literary and emotional resources necessary for his profession. The action is shifted to the Germany of the 1970s when young Wilhelm Meister receives as a present a similar journey from his mother. He gets on his way and meets some bizarre and especially alienated characters typical of a society that had not completely exited the post-war trauma. The accumulation of information and emotion is rendered in the film through a combination of slow action, dialogues that are actually more monologues, and off-screen text probably extracted from Goethe's book. It is a combination that may have worked and may have been really interesting in the movies of the '60s or '70s (used intensely by Antonioni for example) but which in this film has a dormant effect.
Yet, there are a few good reasons why this film deserves to be seen. First of all for the two formidable actresses that appear in the cast. For Nastassja Kinski , still at teenage age and before getting the name under which she became famous, it was the debut film. For Hanna Schygulla, at the peak of her beauty, it was probably the first important role. Both play splendidly in roles that fit them perfectly. The problem is that each of the actors seems to play their roles separately. There is a story in the film that includes an ambiguous romantic triangle, but it lacks any vibration, perhaps because of the wooden acting of the actor in the lead role (Rüdiger Vogler). The existentialist type of the characters has real motives in the history of Germany at that time, but for today's spectators, especially if they are not familiar with that history, their behavior is difficult to understand. The feeling of verbosity at certain moments is accentuated by the slow pace of action in the intermediate scenes. In the absence of many obsolete cultural and historical landmarks, 'Wrong Move' does not say much to the contemporary film viewers.
