Set in contemporary West Berlin (at the time still enclosed by the Berlin Wall), Wings of Desire follows two angels, Damiel and Cassiel, as they roam the city, unseen and unheard by its human inhabitants, observing and listening to the diverse thoughts of Berliners: a pregnant woman in an ambulance on the way to the hospital, a painter struggling to find inspiration, a broken man who thinks his girlfriend no longer loves him. Their raison d'Ãªtre is, as Cassiel says, to "assemble, testify, preserve" reality. In addition to the story of two angels, the film is also a meditation on Berlin's past, present, and future. Damiel and Cassiel have always existed as angels; they existed in Berlin before it was a city, and before there were even any humans.
Among the Berliners they encounter in their wanderings is an old man named Homer, who, unlike the Greek poet Homer, dreams of an "epic of peace." Cassiel follows the old man as he looks for the then-demolished Potsdamer Platz in an open field, and finds only the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. Although Damiel and Cassiel are pure observers, visible only to children, and incapable of any physical interaction with our world, Damiel begins to fall in love with a profoundly lonely circus trapeze artist named Marion. She lives by herself in a caravan, dances alone to the music of Crime &amp; the City Solution, and drifts through the city.
A subplot follows Peter Falk, who has arrived in Berlin to make a film about Berlin's Nazi past. As the film progresses, it emerges that Peter Falk was once an angel, who, having grown tired of always observing and never experiencing, renounced his immortality to become a participant in the world.
As one can take only so much of infinity, Damiel's longing is in the opposite direction, for the genuineness and limitedness of human existence in the world, perhaps a reference to Dasein, or Existenz. When he sheds his immortal existence, he experiences life for the first time: he bleeds, sees colors for the first time (the movie up to this point is filmed in a sepia-toned monochrome, except for brief moments when the angels are not present or looking), tastes food and drinks coffee. Meanwhile, Cassiel inadvertently taps into the mind of a young man just about to commit suicide by jumping off a building. Cassiel tries to save the young man but is unable to do so, and is left haunted and tormented by the experience. Eventually, Damiel meets the trapeze artist Marion at a bar (during a concert by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), and they greet each other with familiarity as if they had long known each other. In the end, Damiel is united with the woman he has desired for so long. The film ends with the message: "To be continued."
The story is concluded in Wenders' 1993 sequel, In weiter Ferne, so nah! (Faraway, So Close!).
What was Peter Falk once?
An angel