Until the End of the World (1991)

2 years ago

Until the End of the World (1991)

THE HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

by Karina Wolf

If you’re looking for trouble, that’s what you will find. – Talking Heads

In 1991, the world was resolving 20th century problems: genocide in the former Yugoslavia; the Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait; the Rodney King case; the Anita Hill hearings; the eighth marriage of Elizabeth Taylor.

It was the year M. visited my high school as an exchange student. She was—is—Croatian, from Dubrovnik, an ancient port (now resort) town on the Adriatic. I’m probably misremembering that she was made to live in the basement of her first host family; in any case, she was self-possessed enough to request a transfer and that’s how we met. M. was singular – elegant, silent, unsmiling but not unfriendly – for good reason. In the year that she was meant to improve her English in America, her father, a politician, was assassinated, and her boyfriend, a photographer, was killed in a bomb blast. Her mother left Yugoslavia for safety in Germany.

The world was bigger than my experience. I recognized it, but there were few people who were a direct link, who were proof. In the hallways and the classrooms, M. existed apart. This wasn’t a considered retreat; she was polite. She didn’t complain or cry. She didn’t refuse to tell her story. There were many who wanted to befriend her; it was the flawed, slightly broken ones who became her confidantes.

Movies about the end times are exactly what you want when you think you want truth. One of the films M. and I saw that year was Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World. Though not the director’s most successful, the film is arguably his most ambitious – a role-reversed Ulysses story that describes a woman’s travels across the globe and a man who waits for her return. It is a 20th century story: unlike current ideations of the apocalypse, there is a home to return to — the world is home. In 1991, global citizenship was still a fantasy and a privilege. And the year 1999, in which Wenders’ movie takes place, was a tessellation of unknowns, a metaphor for modern anxiety or, as in the Prince single, an opportunity for hedonism.

Until the End of the World is not a love story, though love’s byproducts, jealousy and desire, kickstart the plot. Claire Tourneur (Solveig Dommartin) — free spirit, commitment-phobe — is at the apex of an amatory triangle. She awakes in the aftermath of a bad party in Venice, and decides to return to Paris and her unfaithful boyfriend. En route, she crashes cars with two good-natured bank robbers, and she agrees to smuggle their cash for a cut of the holdings.

Enter Sam Farber (William Hurt) who aids Claire when she’s pulled over for speeding. Farber’s a good con, which should red-flag his nature as a romantic prospect. But elusiveness is catnip. Farber steals a bit of her money, and Claire is smitten. She uses the rest of the cash to track him around the world: Lisbon, Berlin, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco, the Outback.

Claire’s travels are a great pleasure of the film. One of its best sections is relayed through video, when Tourneur travels the Trans-Siberian to Asia and faxes footage back to her ex. Suitably, Wenders’ production company is called Road Movies – the genre glamorizes the wanderer, though the director’s itinerant characters have left home for unhappy reasons. Like the work of many of his German and Austrian contemporaries, Wenders’ films explore estrangement. For his characters, traveling seems to be a kind of pathology. Perhaps this is why devastated landscapes recur in Wenders’ films. These settings convey emotion in suspense or in holocaust.

We can divide fears of modernity into three periods: those of industrialization (depicted by the Dadaists, Surrealists and Modernists, who relished the acceleration that technology brought); those of the atomic age (when the world became aware of how technology can turn against us); those of globalization (where technology becomes either our demise or our means of escape). Until the End of the World manages to capture all of these views sequentially. At the time of shooting, Wenders arranged deals with Sony’s R&D department. The technology in the film prefigures much of what we take for granted today — video chat, GPS, voice recognition, and our reflexive reliance and an endless appetite for these proliferating devices.

There are a number of versions of Until the End of the World. I switched my old laptop permanently to Region 2 settings so I could watch the 180-minute director’s cut. But really, all you need to see is in the (slightly) briefer American release. The story nests several films: there are noir conventions as a woman (and many bounty hunters) tracks her criminal lover; a road movie that conveys the beautiful, granular variety of travel, and then the film’s final story, a creation story.

To help Farber’s mother (Jeanne Moreau) regain her sight, Farber father (Max von Sydow) and son have developed a technology that allows the extraction of visual imagery from the brain and its digital recreation. (I thought of this movie when I heard of Christopher Nolan’s new film about dream thievery, Inception.) Even as a nuclear satellite detonates, and the characters are cut off from the world, the entire family, including Claire, become engrossed in the production of images.

It prefigures the solipsism of the virtual world: Claire, her lover, and his father, become addicted to the visual content of their dreams, which they record and play back until they run out of batteries. They ignore emotions, accountability, physical need. It is a compulsion that kills some characters and transforms others. We’re left with the idea that the only sensible person is the one tapping away at his manual typewriter; or he could be another ineffectual person consoling himself with his own mania for stories. The movie doesn’t linger on these questions, though. The film works best when Claire is aloft, and we are allowed the pleasure of watching her next incarnation, working in outer space.

When you’re a teenager you’re looking for what the world is like and who you could be in it. I’m sure its soundtrack and images have dated, and there are certainly deficiencies in the script. But Until the End of the World flies for its first two-thirds: it offers the lightness of endless possibility.