The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty is a great title but an odd underwhelming film from Wim Wenders, his cinematic debut.

I only wish it was about a goalkeeper who went all wobbly when about to face a spot kick.

The film does display some of Wender's cinematic tastes. A liking of Americana, being on the road, a character being a person of few words maybe alienated and a languid pace. There is an existentialism about this film.

Joseph Bloch (Arthur Brauss) is a goalkeeper who gets angry when a goal is not called offside. It is a strangely shot sequence as Bloch does not concentrate on the play and makes no attempt to even save the shot. In fact we do not even see the build up to the play.

Bloch gets sent off and as his team was playing away, he makes his way to the city centre where he watches a film. Later he spends a night with the cinema cashier and he than strangles her. Bloch then leaves the city and spends times with an ex girlfriend in the countryside. Bloch constantly reads the newspaper to see what is happening about the murder, there is also a mute boy who has disappeared. Bloch spends time with his ex, listening to American rock n roll and getting involved in bar fights.

If Bloch is upset about the murder we do not get to know about it. The movie is bookended by a football match, at one point Bloch tells a spectator about the various thoughts that go through in a goalkeeper's mind when a penalty is about to be taken.

The lead character is an enigma, he goes about his normal life but he is a killer, maybe he has killed before, maybe he is a fantasist with his interest in American music and carrying US currency. It could just be that Bloch is contemplative about his existence.

In terms of tension, there is not much at all. Bloch gets on with his life, he is never in danger, no one is closing in on him. Critically lauded, age has not been kind to this film. Slow moving and boring.

I just want to say that this movie, when I watched it first time long ago, opened the doors of what cinema could say, in which ways, and how it could go as far as possible from a typical theatrical or literary (linear,logical, rational) treatment of its artistic matter; pursuing a more "musical" or "harmonically oriented" approach.

Wenders develops this work as a series of "climates" or ambiances(we're talking "street" climates and ambiances, sometimes ugly or ridiculous; not that silly "grandeur" that spoils so many artworks) that contain valuable, almost satirical remarks on the "cheating" that our expectations and concepts are constantly playing to our minds.

The particular sense of humor and drama of the script writer and the director just hit a string on me; as did the musical score. I only regret that is very difficult to find plays or to purchase any copies, in any format, of this strange gem here in Argentina. I could watch it only twice, in cultural centers at Buenos Aires, which is not my hometown. This is a movie that you can enjoy over and over, as if it were a musical masterpiece. I'd like to point out that I'm not a native English speaker, so I apologize if my writing style is not quite correct.

Huh that Wenders guy really knows how to make a good movie. Who would've thought...

The final scene fully reveals the reason behind the film's title.

A goalkeeper, in the moment of a penalty, can become trapped in a sense of absurdity - and ultimately, in an endless, absolute, and unresolvable anxiety. The last scene of the film illustrates exactly that: Bloch is speaking with the man sitting in the stadium and tells him that, during a penalty, if the goalkeeper knows the penalty taker, he might think: "He always shoots to the right, but this time he'll probably go left." Yet at the same time, the penalty taker might think: "The goalkeeper knows I usually shoot right, so he'll expect me to go left. But he doesn't know that I know what he's thinking - so I'll shoot right again." This mental dialogue between the goalkeeper and the penalty taker could go on endlessly, and this infinite back-and-forth brings about a kind of existential void and silent anxiety for the goalkeeper, alone in that moment.

The film portrays the inner world of a goalkeeper living in the absurdity of his life - a life in which nothing has meaning anymore. Even on the football field, he is always the loneliest figure, and that very solitude brings its own sense of emptiness. In the opening scene, twenty-one players stand on one side while he stands alone, feeling an absolute isolation. Later, when the ball passes by him and he reacts with total indifference, it perfectly visualizes that same emptiness.

Over the film's one hour and forty minutes, we watch how deeply he has sunk into this meaninglessness - where anxiety no longer appears as a visible, violent tension, but as a quiet, muted state: an anxiety of indifference, not one of agitation or outburst.

That's why he strangles the woman so effortlessly - not out of anger, but with a cold neutrality, as if the act itself means nothing to him.

Another reflection of the connection between the penalty scene and his life lies in the fact that the goalkeeper's endless internal reasoning - the "what if..." chain of thoughts - leads to paralysis in that moment. Throughout the film, the same pattern appears: in his absurd world, there seems to be no right choice at all, and he is incapable even of choosing.

Wim Wenders was always the most cerebral, the most cinematic of the three Giants of New German cinema (albeit Giants enough to bear favourable comparison even to cinematic Giants-For All-Ages such as Fritz Lang, and FW Murnau). In his hands, even a work so clearly of its maker as Ripley's Game became a perhaps even greater work, even more clearly of its maker such as The American Friend was, or as the Sam Shephard-scripted Paris, Texas was. And perhaps, too, this adaptation of a German bestseller likely is. This film, despite the directors acknowledgements of the influence of Alfred Hitchcock - evident throughout - is A Masterpiece of control and content - admirable in a mature work by an established director, astonishing as a feature debut.

The title is relevant only in a later, casual, conversation the eponymous character has with a provincial policeman, where the policeman innocently spills out his m.o. when confronted by a criminal, but such is the nature of this study that we can't immediately be sure the psychopath is taking everything in. The murder itself isn't even shown in its grisly intensity, merely its foreplay and aftermath. And there's nothing to forewarn us of the killer's intentions: no taunting, no leering looks, no stalkings. (I saw parallels in the murder scene with a similar scene in Hitchcock's underrated 'Frenzy', but only in the way it was shot, and the aforementioned foreplay).

His scanning of every subsequent news report might suggest he's worried, that the noose is tightening around him. But his immediately subsequent actions suggest otherwise. Like the prototype psychopath, compassion is conspicuous by its absence from his every thought and action. But yet, in best cinematic tradition, what 'he' doesn't know is that we can see his every action, can scrutinise his every thought. Can condemn him for his indifference.

Only by giving every frame of this masterly film your full attention will you get to truly 'enjoy' its final frame.