Alice in the Cities

Saw Alice in the Cities, a slow, spacey Wim Wenders film about a journalist who is stuck taking care of a little girl in New York City and Amsterdam.  They are looking for her family and he is trying to finish an article about road-tripping through the US.  The film is slow and subtle and speaking in a language I don't totally understand.

The idea of road-tripping and hunting for the True America is a concept very quintessentially American in the 70s.  That combined with the frequent blues and rock music on the soundtrack make the film feel very American, even though most of the film takes place in Holland.  The protagonist's situation mirrors the girls in many ways: he is displaced and looking for a place to belong, running out of money, and looking for someone to love him.  In saving her he is perhaps saving himself, although the ending makes this interpretation somewhat ambiguous.

The film is very slow though.  It clocks in at 110 minutes but feels much longer.  Much time is spent watching these two meander around New York or Holland, as simple guitar music and synthesizers fill the empty space.  Other recurrent themes are polaroid photos (which Wim Wenders would return to in his other road trip movies) and music and children.  Frequently the little girl gazes longingly at children who know where they belong.

As for the polaroid photos, they provide some fun threads to pull on: the main character complains that they never look like reality.  This is an interesting observation, but goes nowhere that I follow.  Similarly, he rails at the vulgarity of television and radio, but again this sophomoric notion that everything is an ad nowadays is introduced but dropped again, never to be explored.

It reminded me of Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, those films from the 70s about getting lost and being independent and self-indulgent, and looking for belonging, only this time we have a taciturn journalist and a sulky little girl.  I didn't like those movies (I felt the characters were being a bit too selfish and silly) and suspect I did not fully understand them.  As with those, whatever the thought or the mood or whatever that we're exploring in this film is, it's happening on a wavelength I don't operate on.