Product: The American Friend [VHS] (1977)
Rating: 5.0
ambivalence: "I just want to be your friend, Jonathan"
...Henry James once said that it was the germ of a situation, the imaginative possibility, not its final historical explication, that inspired his stories. So. Wenders is inspired by a paranoid thriller, just as Hitchcock was in "Strangers on a Train," another Highsmith thriller. But in each case, of course, the director uses the novel to tell an entirely different story, the story he has in mind. In Wender's case, the story is of a kind of doubled ambivalence, a meditation on the relationship between west Germany and "America", a political, economic, political and, to be honest, military quandary, and the relationship between European "craft" and American "cultural imperialism." Let's be clear on this: Jonathan is a craftsman, from the old European school, .... And yet Wender, in an interview I saw, in his thickly accented but otherwise perfect English, said, "Rock und Roll safed my life."Wender has always been resolutely apolitical in the kinds of films he makes, but his camera does not lie, and for that reason, his movies are charged with political questions that are deeply human and personal, and make me think more about what I believe.