Alice in the Cities

1974 road movie

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A writer runs into a mother and her young daughter at an airport and winds up in a situation where he's traveling around Europe with the latter because they can't find the former.

Maybe it's the influence of the late Robby Muller's cinematography, but this reminded me a lot of Jarmusch. There are some great looking shots in this one, my favorite being one where the camera watches a soaring bird from the Empire State Building. This is very much a movie about place and time, and these 1970's places--New York City, which I know, and some European cities that I don't know because in America we don't have to learn about other places--are captured beautifully by the Muller/Wenders team.

Rudigar Volger--an actor who's got a name like a spy B-movie villain--has this great developing rapport with young co-star Yella Rottlander--an actress who has a name like a freestyle rapper from somewhere in Africa. Early in their road trip, they are two people who are inhabiting the same general space. As their misadventures continue, they develop something that is very close to a relationship, albeit an ambiguous one. There's nothing disturbing or sexual about it, even less so than that Sundays and Cybele movie I recently watched, and there was never a time I thought young Alice was in any sort of danger or that Volger's character Phil had any sketchy ideas. I actually teared up a little during a scene with a telephone booth, one immediately followed by a cute little episode where the pair exercise together. The entire premise is a little bizarre because I can't imagine a mother thinking that leaving an eight-year-old with a scruffy writer/photographer for that long is a good idea, but the 70's were apparently a different time.

Rottlander is really good, simultaneously acting just like an eight-year-old (or however old she's supposed to be) would while having enough wisdom to help push some of the film's sneaky more profound ideas. This movie has a lot to do with time with characters losing all sense of time or having confusion about time zones. There's one fun moment related to time when Volger "blows out" the Empire State Building at midnight. This also throws out ideas about identity, the importance of pictures to prove something is real, the power of those pictures over words, the barbarism of television and its advertisements for the status quo, and fear. Houses like graves, pictures to know what one really looks like, and references to Volger's scribbling abound.

I was pretty excited to see that Can provided the score for this, but there's not much of a score. It's some recurring guitar noodling, and that's all I noticed. Canned Heat is used diegetically, and it's hard to complain about a movie that has both Can and Canned Heat. A very sweaty Chuck Berry also makes an appearance. My favorite musical moment, however, is this recurring shot of a kid wearing this awful vest and eating an ice cream cone while sitting next to a jukebox.