Reviewed by Sam Unsted
Stars Bruno Ganz, Dennis Hopper, Lisa Kreuzer, Gerard Blaine, Nicolas Ray,
Samuel Fuller, Peter Lilienthal, Daniel Schmid | Written by Wim Wenders & Patricia Highsmith
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 121 minutes | Directed by Wim Wenders
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, The American Friend follows Ripley (Hopper), an art forger, as he is forced to move into murder through owing a favour to his boss (Blaine). To facilitate the murder, Ripley focuses in on Jonathan Zimmerman (Ganz), a professional frame-maker who believes he has been diagnosed with leukaemia and wants to make enough money to give a secure future to his family. Jonathan is drawn into Ripley’s world and becomes a kind of middleman between Ripley and his French gangster boss.
The film is a curious piece. It simultaneously adheres to the concerns of early Wim Wenders — existential road movies, slow-burning plotting — and yet seems almost entirely at odds with an early work like Alice in the Cities. Firstly, this is much less obviously a road movie and is primarily in English. But more than that, it seems to be attempting to both pay homage to American cinema (see the cameos of enigmatic greats Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray) and then disregard the structure of storytelling employed in Hollywood. The tone is considered and is primarily interested in evoking mood through colour and enigmatic dialogue rather than driving plot forward. Yet, with the snippets of plot that exist, the film fails to colour the narrative so obviously there and you are left slightly unsatisfied that having taken on a classically nourish plot, Wenders fails to really understand the need to tell the whole story making it so that the actors are doing a lot of work to communicate the level of deceit at play here.
Hopper and Ganz saw their styles mismatched and ended up sorting out their problems with fists on the set, knowledge of which gives their scenes together a nice undertone of animosity, particularly from Ganz’s side. Both give nice performances with Hopper generating his usual quiet mania and Ganz carrying the film’s emotional weight with great skill. He’s pretty wonderful throughout. But the two rarely spend much time together on screen and those are the most interesting moments as Wenders mishandles the French crime boss and we never really come to understand his motives fully. It’s a decent film but certainly not among the most brilliant of Wenders’ career. His use of American cinematic convention transported to Germany works and his love for American cinema itself shines through. But he feels unsure on how to make this work as a cohesive whole and as results it’s a semi-satisfying, overly-mysterious but beautifully shot oddity.
EXTRAS **** Fantastic commentary from Hopper and Wenders detailing the working conditions and onset wranglings that occurred. Also included are some deleted scenes, many of which seem to be plot-based and therefore could have aided the movie in reaching its narrative goals. Still, all very interesting and well-presented.