The American Friend (1977)

good back-story, and good acting

Awesome Movie

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

I loved "Ripley's Game," the American version of this starring John Malkovich, but I have to say "An American Friend" left me cold.I found the locations very interesting and the film itself endless and boring.I know Patricia Highsmith is a wonderful writer, but I have to say her Ripley series to me was always a little strange. In fact, one of the reviewers here wrote he didn't know if the movie was supposed to be taken seriously. That is how I felt when I saw The Talented Mr. Ripley where, instead of leaving the area, Ripley stays in the same place and at one point is inside a room playing two different characters while Philip Seymour Hoffman stood outside the room. I thought Ripley was a real idiot. So I can understand the reviewer's point.Ripley's Game is based on a similar absurd premise: That a dying man would agree to become a hit man. I know that's how I'd like to go - right after a couple of murders under my belt. Here, Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) has been selling forged art, but another associate wants him to knock someone off.Tom of course doesn't want to get his hands dirty so he goes to a local picture framer (Ganz) who has a fatal disease, he's heard. He has a wife and child and some big money for them after he dies would be a good thing. No one will suspect it. The framer eventually does agree, but he and Ripley end up forming an unlikely alliance.The film has many different locations, and uses French, German, and English throughout, which does make it interesting. It's a very dark movie about manipulation, desperation, and moral dilemmas but it's hard if you don't buy the premise up front. And it was just too long.I like Wim Wenders - I recently saw Paris, Texas and I liked it very much. He's multi-talented, but it was the plot of this film that was a turnoff.

I'm pretty sure by now that Wenders is not a filmmaker for me to adopt. He tends to process appearances too much, while grasping in the blind what lies behind them. So, what's left is a synthetic beauty of images framed around space and usually a moderately above-par wrap-around into narrative. Oh, surely he's one of the most talented cinematographers we have. I guess that's enough to appreciate in one filmmaker.But all that is refuted by this film. I'm not sure how much it is that I bring to it, but no matter. It is one of the greatest narratives on karma.It's all tied together between these two people; one who lives in emptiness, another - a frame artist, charged with restoring - who works in form. Together, these two figments, comprise the one consciousness. Indeed, Wenders often frames them as dual counterpoints that complete into one.An artist is who he is, because he trusts the eye, the hand. Ripley is who he is, a hollow shell, because he trusts neither. So, we have the frame artist become framed inside an illusion operated by the other, a narrative that unfolds as gangster stuff around Europe. It's a wonderful film-within device; the movie illusion generated by the deceived mind's eye (he sees a telegram, but is it what he thinks?).Wenders is such a distinctly Western filmmaker though. Notice the notions. Ripley is empty, but empty in the sense that something essentially vital is missing. And the artist is not replenished by his work in form but frustrated for ambition and money, again our Occidental idea where an artist's worth measures in success and not the joy of work itself. It is a world reeled in by craving for things that are not there, implying a dissatisfaction with what is.Empty space is the balancing element, where we can flow into for release. It's magical in the two scenes of crime, extended wanderings in a subway and onboard a train, silent like Melville would have it. Le Samourai seems to be the inspiring visual text. It is about walls that enclose - whereupon we track and lose and find again, and life becomes this game of hide-and-seek, The poignant revelation of karmic wheels? Near the end, when Ripley reveals why the scheme, why the hapless stooge was dangling on unseen strings the whole time. However far-fetched it may seem or paint Ripley in a diabolic light, it is all about sowing seeds. And for Ripley as well, who realizes only too late that what completes him (who can, forgive the literal word play, 'frame', thus contain, his emptiness) is the connection with the man whose fate he has already set in motion.But the thing is this karmic connection that bounds these two together, the setting in motion. Having realized he values the connection, Ripley swoops - like the hand of god - inside the created narrative to assist him. Eventually, the connection is shown to wire them together across space, implying now a metaphysical communion.It's this that may keep the film at a distance; although effective in the sequences that resemble a thriller, it is a film metaphysically heavy and long with silence. It is not comfortably bittersweet, nor quirky like other Wenders films. This is why I value it so as opposed to those others, because it is a lucid picture.

Patricia Highsmith began infusing the world of film with creepy stories as early as 1951, with Hitchcock's masterpiece 'Strangers on a Train'. Her novels about the criminal character Ripley have been popular with several leading directors, and here Wenders has a go at her novel 'Ripley's Game'. It is not totally successful, and it is 'a real downer', with its gloom unalleviated. But it is yet another of Wenders's great films, just terribly depressing and leaving a sickly taste in the mouth. But of course that was what Highsmith aimed at, and Wenders duly executed. The main theme of the film is complicity, and the sub-text is the thin veneer of morality that lies across the surface of most respectable people, which can be more brittle than we imagine and under stress can reveal a spider's web of myriad cracks which quickly reduce the most smoothly groomed personality to a crinkled mass, like a shattered mirror which hangs on in its frame and refuses to drop. Here the shattered mirror is played by Bruno Ganz, a respectable and moral person leading a quiet life as a picture framer in Hamburg (a marvellously gloomy city). Lisa Kreuzer, who had made several Wenders films already, plays his silent and worried wife with deep intensity, and requires no lines of dialogue to convey her fears. Ganz believes he is dying, so he takes drastic measures to secure financial security for his wife and child. Ripley is played with subtlety and genius by Dennis Hopper, as an amiable American in a cowboy hat with a worm in his soul, but who beneath the criminal levels of his personality has an overwhelming and desperate craving for a real friend who is a nice person. We then see the complicity between these two opposites evolve through a harrowing tale of murder and corruption, with the pathetic Ganz becoming increasingly brazen and the brazen Hopper becoming increasingly pathetic, thus merging into one another. We see Hopper's essential loneliness when he is stripped psychologically naked by events. Ganz thinks he needs Hopper, but it is Hopper who really needs Ganz. Highsmith was intrigued by concealed needs, subliminal agendas, and dominance swops. This is a deep psychological melodrama between two men who in normal life would never even meet, much less end up as buddies. Wenders plunges in and gleefully excplores this moral maze with all the eagerness of a ferret in a rabbit hole. What fun he has! And film director Nicholas Ray is marvellous in his cameo as an aged painter of forgeries, living under an assumed name after having faked his own death. Everything about this film is morally dubious, and that is the point. After all, isn't most of life morally dubious? And aren't most people, when put to the test? Here, two unlike objects are struck together and both surprisingly turn out to be flints, producing fire and setting the kindling alight. Watch the blaze.

Simply hypnotic. The only other film to have this kind of impact on me is Naked. It entrances you from start to finish and you can't even think about looking away. Much like Naked, this effect comes primarily from the score which is flawlessly haunting and ominous making you well aware that there is sincere danger ahead. The magnificent symbolisms can be found everywhere from something as simple as a man falling in front of Ganz to something as complex as the way picture frames are used throughout the whole picture. The cinematography is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable I've ever witnessed. I struggle to think of more unique and beautiful shots throughout an entire film. The story itself is simple and unique, portraying someone honest and normal placed into a series of dangerous and very dark events.Bruno Ganz is a tour de force, in a performance that exceeds his in Downfall, as the leading everyman who gets caught up in a life of peril before he even begins to realize it. Things happen to him so fast that you can't help but feel sympathetic towards him and pray that he can get himself out of a jam. The ending is one of the most painful I've ever had to endure. Dennis Hopper proves that he can subtly display deep emotional pain just as well as charismatic, explosive insanity. Wenders and the cast are so incredibly tuned into one another that he can just place the camera on their face for five minutes and you can see every single emotion running through the character and these emotions through the screen and into you, making you feel exactly what the character is feeling. It's one of the most unique and authentic experiences I've had watching a film. The incredible amount of tension should also be noted. I've never had such a feeling of tense pain as I did during the subway scene. It creates an unheard of sensation that runs through you and your body begs for closure before you collapse to the intensity. The fact that Wenders does all of this without a single word of dialogue is truly admirable.