Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.
I’m a big Dennis Hopper fan, and I have also liked everything I’ve seen from Wim Wenders. I state this up front, because those two facts will likely color anything I have to say about Der Amerikanische Freund (The American Friend). It’s also true that this film owes a huge debt to film noir, and I love film noir. You should be sensing a pattern here. I went into this film with huge expectations despite myself. When a film has this much going in a direction I like, it’s too easy to be disappointed when it isn’t perfect. I try to tamp my expectations down when I can, but I couldn’t this time.
What I was most curious about is how Wim Wenders would interpret film noir as a style. Noir is all about the crime and the grit and the seediness of human experience. Wenders, on the other hand, seems to be all about human connection. This has at least been true in the films of his aht I have seen and enjoyed. Those two ideas don’t necessarily fit well together, so a blending of them was going to either be spectacular or a hot mess.
