What's the matter with me? I'm watching a Wim Wenders movie - again! The story told about this movie is that Wenders did a film in Hollywood. Lots of things went wrong. The process was interrupted and Wenders went to Portugal, where he found a film crew that had run out of money. Then he made a film, The State of Things, in which Hollywood is bashed. In the beginning of the film, we see a film team in action. They make a B-movie. It turns out there is no more film and no more money either. The crew, stranded in Lisbon, try to occupy themselves. The director goes to L.A. to hunt down the producer, with fatal consequences.
Wenders attempts to show how real life have no stories but how we try to think that we need "stories". Alas - as soon as the film crew is deserted by their producers, the film falls apart, the story starts to wander. The anti-story theme is also explicity elaborated in the dialogue of the film - sometimes not too subtly. “Stories only exist in stories, whereas life goes by in the course of time without the need to turn out stories”. Errr.
The cinematography, dusty black-and-white, works perfectly to capture the trudging rhytm of the film. But many scenes were far too pretentious (the problem I have with some of Jarmusch's work). However, I must admit that the last 15 minutes, chronicling the re-union of director & producer, were awesome. Here, he builds up some tension and there is also a hint of comedy.
This is not the worst film about movie-making. Wenders might be self-obsessed, but Godard and Fellini are still in a league of their own.
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