Yes this movie is artsy as hell, but man oh man do I love it. It's half philosophical meditation, half romantic fantasy. I found it just as beautiful and sad and lovely every time I watch it. Bruno Ganz is so young-looking here (he is best known in America, I think, as the Hitler's meltdown in the bunker right before Germany's defeat in WWII scene in the movie Downfall) and the Peter Falk "appearance" as it's listed in the credits is so strange yet perfect.
It's funny to me that the black and white works so well, is so beautiful, and yet when we start to see glimpses of color (about halfway through the film) and piece together that these angels, for all their immortality and omniscience cannot, Ganz's angel Damiel's decision to "take the plunge" and become human to pursue the circus acrobat he's fallen in love with makes an artsy German film kind of sense. I love the mythology this movie creates behind angels in Berlin, and the suggestion that it's the same the whole world round. That they were there from the beginning and just waiting for mankind to come to "Germany" and give them shape, language, something to laugh at and strive to understand. I love the sad story of Damiel's fellow angel Cassiel, who is listening in on the thoughts of a man right before he kills himself by jumping off a building, and his trying to work through the grief afterwards. And perhaps most interestingly, I love the way the angels regard the visible and invisible scars of both WWII and the Berlin Wall on the city and its people.
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