It was only after the success of Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987) that Wenders finally had the clout to mount this ambitious shoot—in twenty cities, nine countries, four continents—which, with its $24 million price tag, would turn out to be one of the biggest European productions of all time. Those two earlier hits also had a major thematic impact on the new project, because they each represented a kind of closure in Wenders’ career: Paris, Texas was perhaps his definitive portrayal of America, by which he had been fascinated all his life. And Wings of Desire, with its melancholy vision of a divided, insular Berlin presided over by imperfect angels, felt like his ultimate statement on his native Germany (though he did make a now largely forgotten sequel to Wings, 1993’s Faraway, So Close!, in the wake of the failure of Until the End of the World). These two films liberated Wenders: the road before him now seemed more open than ever.



You can sense this openness, this anxious awe at the vastness of the world, in every globe-hopping minute of Until the End of the World. Wenders famously reached out to twenty of his favorite international musical acts to contribute a song they might imagine themselves playing in the year 1999. Almost all of them accepted the challenge, and he wound up with an epoch-defining rock soundtrack, which could be heard only in bizarre snippets in the shortened version but is allowed to breathe in the full director’s cut, where the music becomes just as much a part of the aura of the film as its images. Meanwhile, Robby Müller’s colorful, eclectic cinematography incorporates multiple shooting formats and styles—from shadowy noir to urban grit to placid naturalism to elegant classicism to pixelated techno fuzz and more. Wenders was one of the world’s foremost filmmakers at the dawn of the nineties, but he also had a (not entirely fair) reputation for making grim, angst-ridden movies—reflecting the stereotype of the bespectacled, black-clad German artiste. Until the End of the World, however, feels like the work of a free man, working in a newly free world.



Wenders told the Los Angeles Times during production: “This is not a science-fiction film. It’s a contemporary film that we set ten years into the future so we could take a few liberties.” He took more than a few, and many of them turned out to be strikingly prescient. The characters drive cars guided by navigation systems not unlike today’s GPS. The internet had only just begun to be commercially available at the time Until the End of the World was made, but the movie accurately portrays the use of search engines, as well as our ability to find people anywhere on earth thanks to their digital footprints. Even the film’s framing device, involving worldwide panic over an Indian satellite crashing on the eve of the millennium and wiping out all electronic communications, makes for an interesting analogue to the very real fear many had in 1999 and the years leading up to it that the Y2K bug would plunge a technologically reliant planet back into the Stone Age.



In setting the film so close to his own time, Wenders allowed himself to expand on the present. For the world in 1990 was already a dramatically different place than it had been just a few years earlier, especially for a German filmmaker. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, part of the seismic series of events that spelled the end of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, resulting in a civilization that seemed to no longer be defined by deadly borders. (Initially, the wall’s coming down was to be a plot point in the futuristic film, but by the time Wenders finished shooting, it was already a thing of the past.) “History is picking up speed along with technological developments, human behavior, and everything else,” the director remarked at the time. Maybe this accounts for the film’s weird, colorful exuberance. Wenders was imagining a future at a time when the present already felt strange and new, like a wonderful dream. But he also suggests that within this brave new world’s wonders would lie the seeds of its own destruction. That’s another way this is the ultimate road movie—it’s about the end of the road.



The short and long versions of Until the End of the World follow pretty much the same story, but for Wenders, the story itself doesn’t matter so much as how he uses perspective and rhythm to tell it. The film alternates between a cinematically buoyant, international espionage plot and a creeping, unnerving stasis. You can see hints of this in its opening scenes, as Claire Tourneur (Dommartin) wakes up in the middle of a never-ending party in Venice and wanders, disoriented, through different multicolored rooms (which may recall for some the creatively lit spaces of Jean-Luc Godard’s own lovers-on-the-run road movie, Pierrot le fou), filled with partygoers who have either passed out or look like they’ve been dancing since the beginning of time. Talking Heads’ “Sax and Violins” plays in the background, as the Day-Glo lighting combines with the artful clutter and shiny, futuristic costumes to create an alluring sense of decadence and decay. After making her exit, leisurely taking a gondola through the canals of Venice (a ride perhaps inspired by Luchino Visconti, cinema’s great poet of historical decadence), and finding her way to her car, our heroine winds up in an epic traffic jam between Venice and France (shades again of Godard, this time Weekend), which prompts her to detour through a forest. Soon enough, she is driving through a majestic landscape devoid of any cars or people whatsoever (which looks like something out of a John Ford or Anthony Mann western). In these early scenes, Claire is confronted with various forms of inertia, and her restlessness prompts her to seek ways out of it. She doesn’t have a destination. She’s a wanderer looking only to keep moving. (Oh, and she also pulls off her black Anna Karina wig to reveal herself to be a blonde, à la Brigitte Bardot in Contempt, finally making the Godard allusions overt.)

