Alice in den Städten (1974)

So it's Wim Wenders again. This time I watch one of his better movies - Alice in den Städten. Yes, it's a road movie. A man travels across the US. We see him in hotels, watching TV, being bored, scribbling, frustratedly smashing a TV. At the New York airport, he runs into a German woman and her child. Philip, the man, is a German writer, a disenchanted drifter (you guessed it!), who is bored with the US and A. The writer and the little family end up in a hotel together. The woman misses her flight and Philip is to take care of Alice, who is then to meet her mother in Amsterdam. She doesn't show up. The only plan the duo comes up with is to track down Alice's grandmother. The problem is only that Alice cannot recall her name, nor the city in which she dwells. 
It is not so much Wender's endless ploddings into fear & existentialism that interest me. That is mostly rather silly & pretentious stuff (ja! Angst vor der Angst!). Nor do I really care about the symmetries or asymmetries between Wenders' depiction of USA and old Europe.
First of all, I like the grainy black & white cinematography. Wenders creates some really poetic and startling images of urband & rural landscapes, trolleys, cars, houses. Nothing much happens, but there is a huge surge in those images all the same. Many scenes contain very little dialogue. It takes a good director to create scenes like that. A less careful director would have ended up with something much more boring.
In one scene, we see Alice & Philip at a café. He orders coffee. She wants something, too. He snarls back that if she wants anything, she should order it. She has a large portion of ice-cream. The camera hovers over their quietness and discomfort, cutting to a frame of a kid drinking lemonade. The kid sits next to a juxebox. The jukebox blares an old Canned heat song. The jukebox is decorated with the "Stereo". The metal letters are kitschy and ugly. Suddenly, Alice blurts out that her grandmother doesn't live in this city after all.
Philip is not sympathetic and not repulsive either. The same goes for the kid. They have to deal with each other's company and that involves several moments of strain and irritation, but also moments of shared experience. I enjoy this film most when Wenders does not make his characters into philosophizing dolls but rather lets the dialogue drift in different directions in a day-to-day way.
Towards the end of the film, I heard a woman sing a familiar snippet of tune. It was, of course, Sibylle Baier (who made a gorgeous album, on which one of the songs is called "Wim").