Author: Jim McLennan

Dir: Deran Serafian
Star: Charlie Sheen, Nastassja Kinski, Christopher McDonald, James Gandolfini

Watching this for the first time in 20 years has a whole new set of resonances that weren’t present originally. I now live in Arizona, where this film is set, rather than London. Co-villain Gandolfini is now inextricably linked to his role as patriarch of The Sopranos, a show still more than four years from making its debut. And Sheen’s subsequent, well-publicized antics act as a amusing backdrop to lines such as “I’m much more than a walking penis – I’m a flying penis!” At least his portrayal of a loudmouthed, arrogant womanizer seems rather more plausible than, say, Sheen as a radio astronomer in The Arrival (coincidentally, written by David Twohy, who also penned this script). One does have to wonder how this might have played if, as originally intended, Tom Cruise had played the role.

It’s probably not a bad thing, particularly because the plot here is so ludicrous, it may well benefit from having someone as the lead who can play it with a self-knowing wink. It involves a bunch of disgruntled former Soviet agents, who hijack a plane full of gold, land it in the Arizona desert, and have plans to return to Russia and use it to fund a coup. Fighting to stop that is “Chris Morrow”, real name Krista Moldova (Kinski), who apparently plunges to her death in what appears to be the latest in the long line of mishaps involving parachuting maverick Richard “Ditch” Brodie (Kinski). With the authorities, in the particular shape of local DA Ben Pinkwater (Gandolfini), Ditch seeks an escape, sure he did everything he should have. He eventually discovers Krista faked her own death because…. reasons…. and she enlists him to help with the battle against her former allies. Which, fortunately, will involve a lot more sky-diving, most notably at the end when they hurtle out the back of a plane in a red Cadillac: he in the driver’s seat, she locked in the boot.

I’ve a lot of time for Twohy, not least for his work on the Riddick franchise, and also A Perfect Getaway, which is far more enjoyable than I should admit. But this one barely deserves to be considered a script, and is much more a paper-thin excuse to link some admittedly spectacular action set-pieces, sprinkled liberally with sexual tension between Ditch and Krista. Though, with this being the nineties and he being Charlie Sheen, it comes over less as tension, and more as harassment. But I was surprised how much of this had apparently stuck in my subconscious. The line “Pack your bags, we’re going on a guilt trip,” used by Ditch, has become one of my go-to phrases over the past two decades, even if I’d forgotten entirely where it came from, and the same goes for the three-legged dog to which Krista refers, that he says must be called “Tripod”. I used that a while back when one of our dogs broke her paw and had to cope with a cast, but similarly, forgot its origin.

Given the barking insanity of the storyline here, Kinski keeps an admirably straight face through it all, whether parachuting on to a building because… reasons… Or whizzing through the desert on an entirely gratuitous two-seater rocket sled, equipped with a tandem ejector seat – purely, it appears, for that overhead shot of the seat coming towards the camera while a giant fireball explodes beneath it.  Once things get going, she is asked to give less a performance, more of a series of reactions to things  going boom. But she did get some kind reviews, Gary Thompson of the Philadelphia Daily News saying, “It’s awfully nice to see Kinski pick up an automatic pistol and blast away at villains after being cooped up in obscure art pictures all those years. She does quite well, bringing to Terminal Velocity a little of the spunk and sexy chemistry that Sandra Bullock brought to Speed.” Though the New York Times disagreed, saying she “gives a thin, jittery performance that is lacking in both sensuality and feeling.”

Perhaps that was a reflection of the relationship between the two stars: I read vague whispers that was a bit “jittery” as well. Still, in comparison to Crackerjack, which immediately preceded this, Kinski’s character is at least a great deal more pivotal to the plot, although Velocity is likely a good deal less coherent. However, in 1994, $50 million was a lot of money – it was only that year Hollywood made its first ever $100 million film, in True Lies, and for entertainment purposes, it’s much better to be spectacular and dumb, than cheap and dumb. There’s no denying the aerial unit certainly earned their slice of the pie, and considering its age, this aspect has stood up well: you can almost believe Sheen and Kinski are hurtling through the sky, especially when you remember this was made before CGI could be used to make anyone appear to do anything.

However, it wasn’t enough to stand out, particular in a year that, as well as the aforementioned True Lies and Speed, also gave us a plethora of great action films that have remained much more well-regarded, including The Crow, Leon: The Professional and Natural Born Killers. Charlie and Nastassja failed to depose Time Cop, in its second week, from the top slot when Velocity hit American cinemas over the last weekend of September. It ended up not even being the most successful parachuting action movie of 1994, even though this beat to the cinemas Drop Zone, which starred Wesley Snipes as another maverick skydiver who battles criminal activities. Neither came close to recouping their (simlar) budgets, but Drop Zone did earn about 50% more; whether it’s any better, I don’t know, Velocity may simply have prematurely entered the American market for wisecracking free-fall.

Dir: Wim Wenders
Star: Otto Sander, Horst Buchholz, Willem Dafoe, Nastassja Kinski

You, whom we love, you do not see us, you do not hear us.
You imagine us in the far distance, yet we are so near.
We are messengers, who bring closeness to those who are distant.
We are messengers, who bring the light to those who are in darkness.
We are messengers, who bring the word to those who question.
We are neither the light, nor the message.
We are the messengers. We are nothing. You are, for us, everything.
— Opening voice-over

Kinski hasn’t appeared in many sequels. I’m not sure if this is a conscious choice, or one dictated for her by the market – there didn’t appear to be much demand for Revolution 2. This was a rare, perhaps unique, exception, her third collaboration with Wenders being a sequel to Wings of Desire from six years earlier. It’s not as highly regarded generally: by IMDb rating, Wings is #3 of the 42 titles for which Wenders received a directorial credit, while Faraway comes in at #10, though the 7.3 grade for the latter is still one many directors would kill for. [It’s also the lowest of the three Kinski films, with Paris, Texas at #2] The main criticism appears to be Wenders’ efforts to bolt aspects of a thriller onto a more contemplative approach. It just isn’t a genre with which he seems comfortable, either writing or directing.

The star is Cassiel (Sander), an angel who roams the streets and skies of Berlin, listening in on humanity’s troubles, yet still yearns to experience all life has to offer. After he intervenes to save a child falling from a balcony, he loses his wings, and is helped by another former angel, Daniel (Bruno Ganz) – now a pizza-maker, he was previously an angel too, whose transformation into a human was the main focus of Wings. Cassiel still struggles to come to terms with the more earthy aspects of life, and unwittingly falls in with shady gangster Tony Baker (Buchholz), not knowing that Baker’s business involves trading bootleg porn for guns. Shocked when he discovers this, Cassiel vows to destroy Baker’s facility, with the help of a group of circus performers and Colombo. Yep, Peter Falk. I’ll get back to him in a bit. However, a rival of Baker hijacks their barge, taking hostage both Cassiel’s friends and the girl whose rescue ended his divine status.

Kinski plays Raphaela, an angel who remains in that form, so serves a similar purpose to the film, as the one Cassiel did in Wings. She is just one of a selection of supporting characters who populate the fringes of the movie, and damn, she looks the part with a pair of wings, almost as much as another Euro-starlet, Emmanuelle Beart, did in Date With an Angel. If Raphaela serves no real purpose except giving Nastassja that once per decade paycheck from Wenders, her mere presence is enough to justify the character’s existence. She’s a good deal less jarring than some of the others, notably Dafoe as “Emit Flesti”, which is one of those names which is nowhere near as clever as Wenders thinks it is, there solely to push events along as necessary – or bring them to a grinding halt, at one point. There’s also Lou Reed, who shows up, for little or no reason. Peter Falk also seems incongruous, both playing himself as an artist, and playing himself playing Colombo, though he played himself in Wings as well, where it was revealed he too was a former angel.

Easily the worst of all is Mikhail Gorbachev, who sits in a hotel room, observed by Cassiel, burbling cod philosophy about how “A secure world can’t be built on blood, only on harmony.” Coming from the former President of the Soviet Union, that’s more than faintly ludicrous. Oh, I get what Wenders was aiming for: between Wings and Faraway, the Berlin Wall had come down and Germany reunited, after 40 years of the Cold War, and the resulting uncertainty and spiritual chaos was clearly a major influence on him. Charitably, it probably had more cultural resonance at the time. But two decades later, Gorbachev’s presence now seems like little more than stunt casting of the highest order, and badly dated at that. Though I’d expect little else from the only former Russian President ever to appear in a commercial for Pizza Hut. Can’t see Joe Stalin doing that, somehow. Hell, or even Vladimir Putin.

It’s a mix of the transcendentally beautiful and philosophical, with the laughably pretentious, overblown and ludicrous. The opening shot is simply one of the best in all cinema, telescoping out to swirl and circle round the 200-foot tall Berlin Victory Column, with its angel statue on the top – on whose shoulder, Cassiel is perched. As in Wings, the film switches between black and white, for the angels’ perspective, and color for the human point of view, and the transitions are often breathtaking in their impact. The movie is generally at its best when there’s nothing much happening: Cassiel wandering the city, either listening in on the inhabitants’ thoughts, or after his transformation, coming to terms with being human, and all that entails, both good (the ability to enjoy a stuffed olive) and bad (it appears former angels have a weakness for hard liquor, and unfortunately little tolerance for it). And Sander is perfect for the role, his face capturing both the innocence and wisdom you would imagine such a character having.

But, oh dear… The more worldly aspects are just terrible, completely implausible and feeling like they strayed in from a bad pastiche of a Coen Brothers film. Witness the witless scene were Cassiel and Baker are held at gunpoint by Baker’s rival, who has Baker’s feet in a bucket of cement and is waiting by the side of a canal, for it to harden. Cassiel’s flailings somehow knock the rival into the canal, and his minions squawk about like headless chickens. It’s more or less impossible to take anyone seriously as a threat after that point, and that’s before we get to the bumbling security guards, talked by Colombo into searching for a non-existent contact lens and pretending to sleep. It’s such a sharp contrast to the more thoughtful and spiritual aspects, you are left to wonder if Wenders allowed a nine-year-old child to handle these sections of the script, and they completely destroy the atmosphere which had been lovingly created. A far greater consistency of tone is the main reason why Wings of Desire is the better movie.

Dir: Andrei A. Eshpai
Star: Nikita Mikhalkov, Nastassja Kinski, Victor Rakov, Sergey Perelygin
a.k.a. The Insulted and Injured

My editor, Alla Savranskaya, was working for the Moscow Film Festival in 1988 when producer Ibrahiim Moussa was a jury member. She told him my film had just entered production. He said, “Did you know my wife is Nastassja Kinski?” She said, “Yes.” He said, “Did you know her children are named after Dostoevskian heroes and that she dreams of playing Dostoevsky?”
— Andrei Eshpai

Following up on Torrents of Spring (based on a work by Ivan Turgenev) and Il sole anche di notte (Leo Tolstoy), Nastassja completed the set of films inspired by Russian authors with this period drama, based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which was first published in 1861. And, boy, is this one a downer. By the time you reach the end, you wonder why anyone chooses to read 19th-century Russian literature, unless it is to achieve a realization that, no matter how bad your own life is, it could always be worse. That’s clear from the opening speech by the narrator, Ivan (Perelygin): “I cannot help continually recalling all this bitter last year of my life. It was a gloomy story, one of those gloomy and distressing dramas, which are so often played out unseen.” When a 19th-century Russian author starts off by telling you this is going to be “one of those gloomy and distressing dramas,” you’d better make sure all sharp objects are well out of reach before proceeding further.

Ivan holds an unrequited candle for Natasha (Kinski), with whom he has been friends for a long time. It’s in this spirit of friendship that he helps her see her love, Alessia (Rakov) in secret. Subterfuge is necessary, because he comes from a poor but noble family, and his father (Mikhalkov) has plans for an arranged marriage to Katya, the daughter of a rich family, in order to restore their fortune. In order for this to happen, he has to wreck the relationship between Alessia and Natasha, and tries various ploys to that end, hoping either for Alessia to fall for his intended bride instead, or by using Ivan to drive a wedge between the couple. Adding to the difficulty of matters, Alessia and Natasha’s father are embroiled in a legal battle that has set them at each other’s throats. Meanwhile, Ivan has taken in a young girl, whom he saved from abuse, only to find that she has a connection to events at hand too.

As the quote at the top suggests, this was very much a passion project for Kinski, and remains the only Russian language film in her career. She is apparently “fluent” in Russian, according to the IMDb, but I’m not certain she wasn’t over-dubbed here, as her voice seems rather different from her other movies of the time. It’s not exactly much of a stretch for her to play the object of desire for two men, but she handles it well. Perhaps the standout moment is when she rises from her sickbed, to fiercely reject Alessia’s father. He has come visiting while she’s ill, and offers to give her back the money her father lost in the lawsuit, as “proof of his sympathy.” It’s just one of his many, similar schemes, and Mikhalkov is very effective in his role, playing someone who is unwilling to let any moral scruples get in the way of doing what he genuinely believes is best for the family. And he doesn’t care what you think.

The main problem here, is that none of the other characters can stand up to him, either in terms of the story or in cinematic presence. Alessia is a dim pawn to his father’s schemes, and perpetually vacillates between Natasha and Katya, burbling on to the former about the marvelous qualities of the latter: “If only you knew what a tender soul she is!  When I think of her I always feel I become somehow better, cleverer, and somehow finer.” Ivan is probably worse still: I’m guessing Dostoyevsky took himself as inspiration, with Ivan being a struggling writer, but the way he follows Natasha around like a puppy, unable to voice his affection for her, is immensely irritating. It’s the behavior of a love-struck teenager, not an adult male, and the longer the film went on, the greater my urge to reach into the screen, back to the 19th century, and strangle Ivan.

Watching miserable people do miserable things to other miserable people, only to sink further into misery, all set against a historical backdrop that alternates between grinding poverty and moral disdain just isn’t my idea of entertainment. This kind of thing can work, shedding light on man’s inhumanity to man in a way that has relevance to a modern viewer, or simply creating memorable characters, that stick in the viewer’s mind. But it needs a clear goal as well as a firm hand to carry this off, and despite Mikhalkov’s solid work, Eshpai never gets very far off the ground, in either direction. Of the three adaptations of Russian literature, filmed in short order by Kinski, this is very much the least of the three. Perhaps a less apparently reverential approach toward the subject matter might have paid off better.

It was an incredible emotional drain and huge challenge because Dostoevsky is one of the deepest novelists in the history of literature, and the demands of the prose itself were enormous.
— Nastassja Kinski

Dir: Paolo/Vittorio Taviani
Star: Julian Sands. Charlotte Gainsbourg, Massimo Bonetti, Nastassja Kinski
a.k.a. Night Sun

While separated by more than a century and half a continent in their settings, there are some interestingly similar resonances with Tess here. In both cases, we have a couple, engaged to be married across a class divide. However, a dalliance in the woman’s past derails the matrimony – though there’s more than a whiff of societal double-standard, with the man no less guilty of the same sort of thing. Still, stunned by the revelation, he abandons the woman in search of happiness and fulfillment elsewhere – only to discover he might well have been better off showing some more tolerance.

Of course, it’s certainly not an exact parallel. The class divide here goes the other way, with promising but low-born young soldier Sergio Giuramondo (Sands) getting an arranged marriage to the noble Cristina Del Carpio (Kinski) for career purposes, at the behest of the king. And, in this case, there wasn’t any rape or coercion involved: Cristina and the king were actually lovers for a year, which is why she’s willing to consider Sergio as a match and marry below her station. Her fiancé is so upset by the revelation, he enters the priesthood (rather than heading for the colonies like Angel Clare), only to find himself the clerical equivalent of a zoo exhibit, a soldier turned priest trotted out for the amusement of his former colleagues.

Realizing it’s not the escape for which he hoped, Sergio takes the place of a hermit in a remote hovel, only to find neither the rest of the world still unwilling to leave him alone. Another aristocratic woman shows up in on his doorstep in the middle of a rainstorm, and attempts to seduce him – his resistance involves an axe and a body-part, shall we say. Sergio also is credited with restoring the power of speech to a brigand’s son, and When word of that miracle gets out, any hope he might have for a peaceful life pretty much gets up and leaves. The church moves to take advantage of its newest religious superstar, and it’s not long before there is a constant stream of supplicants awaiting his blessing – it’s a religious groupie (for want of a better phrase) that eventually proves Sergio’s downfall.

Kinski doesn’t get much more than a couple of scenes here, but they are pivotal, setting the hero on his path to solitude. When we first see Cristina and Sergio, they’re preparing for their marriage, scheduled to take place the following day. While he confesses to having originally approached her out of self-interest, saying “I was thinking of my career… I wanted to be part of the aristocratic society that excluded me,” he has now genuinely fallen for her, saying “How paltry all that seems next to you.” Their conversation is interrupted by her being requested to sing, but the audience’s attention in turn is stolen by the arrival of a gift from the king: a pair of mechanical birds in a cage. It’s this which triggers Cristina’s confession of her affair with the monarch, telling Sergio, “Everyone knew about it. That’s the only reason my family accepted you.” He leaves without another word, and we never see her again, though at times it seems every other woman he encounters, is an echo of his first true love.

In this area, I note particularly the presence of Charlotte Gainsbourg, who doesn’t just resemble Kinski, but was also the offspring of a notorious European father. In her case, Dad was a one-time lover of Brigitte Bardot, Serge Gainsbourg – of particular resonance, I note rumblings that have surrounded the Gainsbourgs ever since they released a song called Lemon Incest when she was 12. That aside, the rest of the film is largely Sands’ to carry, and I’m fine with that. I’ve enjoyed his performances in a wide ranges of films, even cheerful B-movies like Warlock, and he gives the film here a spiritual center that’s extremely solid. I can’t say I’ve seen any other of the Taviani brothers’ films, but on the evidence of this, they would seem worth checking out: they and cinematographer Giuseppe Lanci have an eye for the pastoral landscapes which, again, is reminiscent of Tess. Particular praise here should also go to composer Nicola Piovani, who seems to be a frequent collaborator with the Tavianis, and whose soundtrack here provides an excellent companion to the storyline.

Like Torrents of Spring, this is based on a work of late 19th-century Russian literature, in this case, Leo Tolstoy’s Father Sergius, although the hero in the original short story was a prince himself, rather than a career soldier. As with Torrents, I do have an issue with the ending, which sees the hero do not much more than exit, stage left, without any true sense of resolution. However, it works rather better here, as Sergio returns to his roots, and appears to discover that that the true secret of happiness is simply wanting what you have, rather than yearning or striving for some idealized existence, that can never be achieved. It’s quite poignant, in particular that Sergio has to go through so much pain, both emotional and physical, to come to the realization that the happiness he sought was probably to be found with the woman he abandoned, in pursuit of an apparently mythical Nirvana.