While we greatly admire Wim Wenders, to be honest, his narrative output has disappointing for years now, and from by all accounts, that hasn’t changed with his latest “The Beautiful Days Of Aranjuez.” Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, and currently screening at TIFF, the verdict on the movie — which once again finds the filmmaker playing with 3D — seems to be is that it’s a talky non-starter. Still, Wenders is a master craftsman and that talent looks like it’s on ample display in the new trailer and clips from the movie.
READ MORE: The Essentials: The 10 Best Wim Wenders Films
Starring Reda Kateb, Sophie Semin, Jens Harzer, and Nick Cave, and based on the play by Peter Handke, the film is mostly a two-hander, as author contemplates the conversations between the characters he’s writing about, as we watch it come to life. Here’s the synopsis from TIFF:
Setting the film in a bucolic countryside with the towers of Paris barely visible in the far distance, Wenders again employs 3D to place his characters, and the audience, within a stunning summer landscape. The sounds of the breeze and rustling leaves provide their own interludes to the intense conversation taking place on a garden patio under a leafy bower. As the author muses alone in his study, looking out his window, his characters engage in conversations he is writing. Soledad (Sophie Semin), highly analytical and honest, traces the story of her many loves, from her first sexual experience to her later disillusionments, as her male companion (Reda Kateb) interjects and asks probing questions. He often moves the talk from intense self-examination to the subject of the more prosaic beauties that surround them, while the author finds relief in the magnificent Wurlitzer, from which songs by Nick Cave regularly play.
There’s no U.S. distributor for “The Beautiful Days Of Aranjuez,” so for now, this material will have to tide you over until you see the film.