2024-01-16 23:00:06
Damielle (Marie-Laure Garnier, left) in “The Wings of Desire”, at Bateau Feu, in Dunkirk (North), in November 2023. CHRISTOPHE RAYNAUD DE LAGE
A white rectangle crossed by gray clouds, two angels in long coats, wings at rest: it doesn’t take much for director Grégory Voillemet to implicitly evoke the images of Wim Wenders’ masterpiece Wings of Desire (The sky over Berlin1987), from which the composer Othman Louati based an opera of the same name, with a libretto by Gwendoline Soublin.
The initial idea belongs to scenographer Johanny Bert. But it’s La Co[opéra]tive, this consortium of some six theaters (national stages and operas) brought together to ensure greater influence on operatic art, which, by commissioning it, is authorizing itself, for the first time since its foundation in 2014, to the production of a global creation.
With the unforgettable and poetic black and white peregrination of its angelic creatures casting their compassionate gaze on post-war Berlin, the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 is one of the major milestones in history the cinema. Its lyrical adaptation, written for seven singers and thirteen instrumentalists, mixed with an electro soundtrack, is however not a copy of the film. This is how Damiel (Bruno Ganz, in the film), the angel who renounces eternity for the human condition and the love of a young trapeze artist from the Alekan circus, Marion, is here embodied by a woman, Damiel. Peter Falk’s role has disappeared, while Nick Cave’s torrid hip swaying in an underground venue is sketched out by a sort of trance. The evocation of concentration camps has been extended to the mass graves of the Shoah, a mother holding for a moment in her lungs the smoke of her child who disappeared in the crematorium ovens.
Impressive puppets
Among the decorative elements which recall the dreamlike or hyperrealistic images of the film, painted canvases for the Berlin Wall or the Alekan Circus, drawings and tags, but also trestles for the State Library (headquarters of the angels) or the no man’s land of Potsdamer Platz, cut in two by the dividing line.
The most impressive thing is the almost life-size puppets that embody the humans (singers). There is obviously the questioning child and his mother with her cigarette, the Magnet desperate and the depraved beggar woman covered in rhinestones, the graffiti artist in overalls and the one-legged old survivor with his wooden crutch (a sort of double of the Homer of the film), and, of course, the pretty trapeze artist with white feather wings. All of them have the dented features of Egon Schiele-style characters, and we owe the wonderful puppeteers Gabriel Allée, Lucile Beaune, Enzo Dorr, Eirini Patoura, Alexandra Vuillet and Aitor Sanz Juanes, masters of manipulation capable of creating real moments of life , the strongest and most moving emotions.
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