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Kings of the Road
(Im Lauf der Zeit)

Directed by Wim Wenders.
With Rüdiger Vogler, Hanns Zischler, Lisa Kreuzer.
West Germany, 1977, DCP, black & white, 175 min.
German and English with English subtitles.
DCP source: Janus Films

The shadow of Germany’s division in 1949 hangs heavily over Wenders’ final entry in the “Road Trilogy,” and the personal toll of the separation is etched on the face of Rüdiger Vogler, who once again embodies a melancholy romantic, but this time plying the unglamorous trade of film projector repairman in an era of declining theatrical movie-going. Working in the rolling expanses of the West German countryside along the border of East Germany, Wenders conjures a nation of crumbling institutions and adrift citizens, but one nonetheless defined by a ramshackle beauty (even a roadside bratwurst shack has a pristine design sense behind it). Vogler’s foil is a suicidal divorcé played by Hanns Zischler, with whom he shares a taciturn but therapeutic companionship as the two amble from one small-town handyman gig to another in a beat-up passenger van-cum-mobile home, all while the gorgeous slide-guitar balladry of Improved Sound Limited weaves in and out of the soundtrack like the favored mixtape of a fraternal road trip. A lovingly photographed time capsule of rural Germany in the 1970s, Wenders’ long, wandering ode to the healing nature of vagabondage excels in summoning an eerie nostalgia for all things irrevocably lost to history.

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