Reviewed by Ron Holloway
(from 2008 Festival de Cannes; entry in official competition) The Palermo Shooting (Germany/Italy) marks German director Wim Wenders's ninth entry in the Cannes competition* - a record that alone puts him head and shoulders above others in contention for this year's Golden Palm. But there's more to the Wenders story than just that. Wim is a kind of Cannes ritual, if such is possible in today's festival politics. One look at that record raises not only eyebrows, but also the question: How does he do it? His first appearance in the Cannes competition was 32 years ago, when his Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of the Road) (1976), photographed by ace cinematographer Robby Müller in black-and-white, was awarded the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize. Shot from a script that barely covered a page, Kings of the Road stands today as one of the high-water marks of New German Cinema. Improvisation, from that time on, became his directorial trademark. "Most stories are quite self-centered and have a tendency to push everything else aside," he once said in an interview, reiterating his disdain for script-defined storytelling cinema. "All the stuff you have to show in the course of a film just to satisfy the dramatic construction and keep the storyline going. But films can do so much more than just transport a plot!" The year after his Cannes debut with Kings of the Road, Wenders returned to the Croisette with Der amerikanische Freund (The American Friend) (1977). Loosely based on a Patricia Highsmith mystery thriller, The American Friend starred Dennis Hopper among a bevy of name actors: Nicholas Ray, Samuel Fuller, Daniel Schmid, and Jean Eustache (all since deceased).
Fast forward thirty years, and Hopper has rejoined Wenders in The Palermo Shooting to impersonate Death, the mysterious cloaked figure pursuing the photographer Finn - an alter ego for the director himself, played by Campino, the leader of Rock 'n' Roll band Die Toten Hosen - from Düsseldorf to Palermo. Both Wenders and Campino were born and raised in Düsseldorf. Wenders's third visit to Cannes, with Hammett (1982), a production for American Zoetrope, is the one he least likes to talk about. The San Francisco story of hardboiled detective writer Dashiell Hammett living one of his own stories in real life, Hammett went through several rewrites before finally limping its way into production. While in Cannes with Hammett, he hit upon the idea of renting an hotel room in the Carlton to allow filmmakers an opportunity to speak undisturbed to a turned-on video camera about film art. Chambre 666 (1982) was the first of many amusing festival ploys Wenders used at random in the years to come. Other ploys he was to master over the ensuing years were such image eyecatchers as changing the color of his glasses, cutting his hair to aptly fit the style of the film production, wearing chic Japanese dress, mumbling something cryptic into the camera during interviews to avoid answering direct questions, taking snapshots of his travels for exhibitions in world-wide Goethe Institutes and exchanging female partners almost, seemingly, on a whim. Defiant over the Hollywood Hammett debacle, Wim returned to Europe to shoot quickly on a shoestring Der Stand der Dinge (The State of Things) (1982), the wacky story of a film crew in Portugal about to run out of film. Featuring Samuel Fuller and Roger Corman in supporting roles, The State of Things was entered in the Venice film festival - and won the Golden Lion. Supported by German and European film funds, Wenders enlisted American playwright Sam Shepard to collaborate with him on Paris, Texas (1984), awarded the Golden Palm that year at Cannes. Originally, Shepard was to play the lead role in Paris, Texas, but, due to scheduling conflicts, the lot fell to Harry Dean Stanton instead. Natassja Kinski and Bernhard Wicki also starred in this rambling film about a man wandering around the Texas desert. At this stage in Wenders career, he had already mastered the inside-out of festival politics. The print of Paris, Texas came directly from the lab to the projection room at Cannes. Interviews, given in three different languages, were with picked journalists. Also, the only preview of the film's contents before the press screening of Paris, Texas at Cannes was a "teaser" broadcast on French television. That, too, was an easy option, for Wenders had lived for a time as an art student in Paris and speaks French fluently. From then on, like a magician, Wenders was a welcomed guest in the Cannes competition, an auteur who could charm Cannes cineastes with an ever-expanding grab-bag of tricks. Veteran French cinematographer Henri Alekan replaced Robby Müller to lens his Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) (1987), the tale of a fallen angel set in Berlin. Wenders was awarded Best Director. In 1989, he served as president of the International Jury. Under his aegis, Steven Soderburgh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (USA) was awarded the Palme d'Or. Wenders's In weiter Ferne, so nah (Far Away, So Close) (1993), the sequel to Wings of Desire, was awarded the runner-up Grand Jury Prize. Constructed on mood rather than narrative, its overlapping dialogue seemed to free Wenders entirely from the burden of a screenplay. About this time, Wenders also became intrigued by the technological side of filmmaking. The End of Violence (1997), set in California, projected a future in which human life would be completely controlled by satellite surveillance.
In 2003, he was back at Cannes again as president of the Caméra d'Or Jury, which awarded the Best First Feature to Christoffer Boe's experimental Reconstruction (Denmark) in the International Critics Week. Having returned again to the United States to film Don't Come Knocking (2005), a kind of update on Paris, Texas and Hammett, Wenders pulled out all the stops to promote the film in the French press and media. Wenders appeared on the front page of the Le Monde special edition that focused on the not-to-be-missed Cannes entries. Die Zeit, the prestigious German weekly, featured the director's remembrances of his many visits to Cannes - particularly the night he played flipper ("to calm my nerves") on a pin-ball machine in the Petit Carlton Bar on the night of the Paris, Texas premiere two decades previous. Even Sam Shepard was back in Don't Come Knocking, this time not just as screenwriter but also as the actor playing Howard Spence, the burnt-out Western star who gallops off the set in the middle of production. Shot partially in Moab, Utah (John Ford country), partially in Butte, Montana (Dashiell Hammett country), Don't Come Knocking came across as a backlot Western - a film of pretense without much depth. | 
