LISBON STORY (54)

Directed by: Wim Wenders (1994)

Starring: Rudiger Vogler, Patrick Bauchau, Manoel de Oliveira

The Pitch: A German sound recordist gets a letter from a director friend, asking him to come to Lisbon and make a film together ; but when he gets there his friend has vanished.

Theo Sez: One of the title's two words is in fact deeply misleading (clue : it isn't "Lisbon"). Hardly anything happens in this thoroughly pretentious if surprisingly fun movie, a near-shapeless diary that is, both visually and thematically, a study in contrasts : the dim, shadow-laced interiors against the city's hard, implacable sunlight ; the lugubrious, distinctive Lisbon of Fernando Pessoa's writings against the modern city of freeways and suspension bridges (and, by extension, against an increasingly uniform post-EEC Europe where cultures and languages have all jumbled together) ; and, above all, the notion of film-making "from the heart" against the reality of a commercial cinema. The film is predictably pessimistic about the future of more personal movies (the first thing we see is an obituary of Fellini), leading to a rather tiresome final section debating the Death Of Images, but also rather affecting in its commitment to the madness and magic of film-making. "He's a little..." says someone of the elusive director, making the universal rotating-finger gesture for insanity ; "You mean a little?..." asks our hero, turning the gesture into the cranking of a movie camera. And they both laugh.