THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK (72)

Directed by: Wim Wenders (1971)

Starring: Arthur Brauss, Kai Fischer, Erika Pluhar

The Pitch: Creepy Austrian guy - a goalkeeper by profession - hangs around a lot, kills a girl for no particular reason, and decamps to a small village in search of an old flame. Weird.

Theo Sez: The kind of art-film they don't make much anymore, consisting mostly of long, affectless shots of our hero sitting down, standing up, walking aimlessly about etc etc, and taking a perverse delight in being unsatisfying - it's the kind of film that shows a shot at goal in a football match then cuts away before we see if the ball went in or not, or shows a man lifting an axe to chop up firewood but moves on before he brings it down (it's incredibly frustrating - you keep imagining the thud of that axe coming down over the next few scenes). All of which is, of course, entirely appropriate for a film about alienation and restlessness (the goalie's anxiety at the penalty kick is because he has to make a commitment, i.e. decide which side he's going to fall on) ; it's startlingly in tune with our 90s landscape, its unsmiling protagonist - thin and gangly, with the unsettling menace of a coiled snake - a taciturn cousin to Johnny in NAKED, drifting through an equally pointless life (anchored only by movies and snippets of 50s rock'n roll - the music rights would've cost a fortune nowadays). Above all it works because Wenders is alive to detail, as alert to specifics - kids playing at the edge of the frame, a man putting together a salami sandwich, the stolid slowness of a stout village frau giving directions - as his recent films have become abstract and diffuse. It's a shock to recall - out of the fog of Ideas and Messages in a half-baked mess like THE END OF VIOLENCE - that there was a time when he gave a damn about Life.