Kings of the Road, a film by Wim Wenders from 1976, opens with a startling event. Bruno, a traveling movie projector repairman played by Rüdiger Vogler, is shaving next to his parked van when he sees a Volkswagen zoom off the road and into the Elbe River at top speed. If this is a suicide attempt, it’s a failure, because the car floats, and its driver, Robert (Hanns Zischler) sheepishly wades to shore. Bruno offers to give him a ride, and Robert ends up sticking around. The two of them travel around Germany, living in the huge van and meeting various characters on their journey.
With this poetic road film, Wenders went from a minor figure in German cinema to an internationally recognized director. Three hours long, and shot in gorgeous black and white by Robby Müller and Martin Schäfer, the film maintains a mood of wistful, outsider bonhomie with precious little dialogue, relying on long takes and the body language of the two leads to immerse the viewer in its world.
Robert, a recently divorced linguist, is a cryptic, angst-ridden figure—at one point going off by himself to exorcize a ghost in the person of his hated (and loved) father, the publisher of a small town newspaper.
The shadow of the Third Reich and the war still hangs over Germany in this time period. A barely voiced suspicion of the older generation, a dread of some kind of contagion from the Nazi past, is part of the mournful atmosphere often spent in silence by the two main characters. More than any other road picture I’ve seen, Kings of the Road conveys that feeling of sitting together in a vehicle for long stretches in an intimacy that increases even as it remains unspoken.
Long-time Wenders cohort Vogler plays Bruno with an eccentric, roll-with-the-punches charm, but in time we glimpse his fears and, in a sequence where he meets up with a small town girl, his loneliness around women. None of this is at all trite or formulaic—our knowledge of the two wanderers comes as naturally as the unfolding of their awareness of one another. The odd plot device of Bruno repairing movie projectors allows Wenders to meditate with bemusement on the state of German film, and German culture in general, in relation to the lives of ordinary people. One marvelous scene has the duo give up trying to fix a projector behind a screen, substituting an impromptu bit of shadow slapstick for the benefit of a delighted audience of children. Everything leads up to a drunken evening in an old sentry house on the border between East and West Germany, in which much is revealed.
This film has been overshadowed by Wenders’ international smash hit Wings of Desire from 1987, and I think the style of that movie has somehow prevented people from exploring the director’s other less flamboyant works.
This film, with its languorous pace and long silences, is not without moments of tedium, but if you let yourself relax into Wenders’ rhythm, there’s a richness and a kind of wisdom to be experienced here. More thoughtful and tender than the average road or “buddy” film, Kings of the Road is a rough-hewn hymn to the virtues of taking one’s time.
