What a wonderful, quirky, mesmerising film this is! Sound familiar? It must be Wim Wenders! So much of this film revolves around the discovery of a local music culture, in this case Portuguese. Five years later, Wenders would do the same thing for Cuba with 'The Buena Vista Social Club'. Then he made some elderly Cuban musicians into CD superstars, but earlier, with this film, he had done the same for the Portuguese group Madredeus, and their amazing singer Teresa Salgueiro, who also acts in the film. (Check out her recent solo CD 'Obrigado'.) The main character in this rambling film is a film sound man, played with effortless charm by Ruediger Vogler. The film has lots of kids wandering in and out, accepted as being just as important as the adults, and this echoes Wenders's treatment of Alice in his early film 'Alice in the Cities'. Wenders has a real eye for a cutie, whether an irresistibly charming child or an overwhelmingly alluring woman such as Theresa Salgueiro, and he makes the most out of the impenetrable mystery which they represent as individuals and as types. He teases the ineffable out of the mundane, like Ariadne unwinding her thread. The story, such as it is, is as mysterious as the people in this film. The sound man is urgently summoned to Lisbon by his film-maker friend Friedrich, but arrives to find that he has vanished. He then becomes lost in the wonder of the sounds of Lisbon, going around with his directional microphone over-hearing the most astonishing sounds, sounds which most of us would overlook (or should I say overhear), but which are brought out for us in the sound track by clever manipulation of the levels, or the use of 'sound design'. The entire film then becomes an exploration of the magic of the city, though not of any of its tourist spots, and of the magic of its music and its children. As for Friedrich and what he has been up to, well that would be telling. But it all gets very profound and philosophical. Wenders is never superficial. He is always digging the well a bit deeper. 'There may be gold down there!' And as often as not, there is. Don't miss this if you are a sophisticated film lover, but if you are not, don't expect easy answers or a thrill a minute, because that is not what Wim Wenders is about at all.
Review of Lisbon Story
