Solveig Dommartin naked in the director’s cut of Until the End of the World (1991)

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Until the End of the World was an extremely complex and ambitious project from the esteemed director Wim Wenders. It was filmed in … well … you name a place – San Francisco, Lisbon, Sydney, Venice, Paris, the Australian outback, Tokyo, Germany, Russia … maybe some others I missed. With an expansive, sometimes random plot, it is part sci-fi, part detective story, part heist film, part art film.

Conceived as the ultimate road movie, Wim Wenders’ magnum opus–a decades-in-the-making science-fiction epic starring Solveig Dommartin and William Hurt–follows the restless Claire Tourneur across continents as she pursues a mysterious stranger in possession of a device that can make the blind see and bring dream images to waking life.

That makes the film sound straightforward. It isn’t. The explosion of a nuclear satellite and the possible end of the world, as well as a bevy of sub-plots, many of which are never resolved or made relevant, all serve to make things much more complicated. If you’re interested in the details, Wikipedia gave a good summary of the meandering plot. Insiders claimed that Wenders’ first cut was 20 hours long. It was released to theaters in compressed 2 1/2 (USA) and 3-hour (Europe) versions, but the “director’s cut” shown here was restored back to five hours.

The theatrical version was ignored by audiences. Some critics praised it, but Roger Ebert had no patience with its random, endless digressions:

His screenplays have a tendency to begin with enigmatic figures appearing out of nowhere, and to continue with a series of random events. Sometimes that works. “Until the End of the World,” alas, plays like a film that was photographed before it was written, and edited before it was completed; at the end, the insights will mostly have to be our own.

Critics and cinephiles love the five-hour version.

Tomato Meter: 89%
Popcorn Meter: 89%

Solveig Dommartin was Wenders’ muse. I suppose you’ve forgotten about her, because she died young (age 45), two decades ago (2007), but over the course of a long personal and working relationship, she was at various times Wenders’ editor, his leading lady, his lover and his collaborator. In this particular film, she co-wrote the film with Wenders, and co-starred with William Hurt.


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Solveig made her film debut in Wenders’ Wings of Desire. Her role would become one of the iconic characters of cinema history. She played the ethereal circus performer whose appeal was so great that it enticed an angel to surrender his power and immortality to become human and experience her love.

She did some brief nudity in that film:


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