E-Mail This Article to a Friend Fairy tales (continued)
	Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants/Happily Ever After Directed by Yvan Attal. With Charlotte Gainsbourg, Yvan Attal, Alain Chabat, Alain Cohen, Emmanuelle Seigner, Anouk Aimée, and Johnny Depp. In French with English subtitles. A Kino International release (100 minutes). At the Kendall Square. "Matters of Life and Death: The Films of Bruno Ganz" At the Harvard Film Archive through June 22.

AMONG THE HIGHLIGHTS of In weiter Ferne are the cameos by Lou Reed and Mikhail Gorbachev. Reed’s music makes a welcome if gratuitous appearance in Yvan Attal’s Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d’enfants/Happily Ever After; "Monday Morning" and "I’m Waiting for the Man" crop up on the soundtrack with all the discordance of the Who backing an SUV commercial. As for cameos, Anouk Aimée plays a symbol of domestic stability and Johnny Depp plays an embodiment of the temptation to stray.

Otherwise, this film is the antithesis of Wenders’s ambitious if wrongheaded effort — Gallic pabulum. Attal himself plays Vincent, a used-car salesman who distinguishes himself among his colleagues by his seeming domestic bliss. His wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Attal’s real-life wife) and son are wonderful. Alas, Vincent cannot be content with just one woman. His lothario friend jests at his tortured conscience. Vincent has been taught fairy tales since childhood! His bourgeois notions are out of date! Perhaps so, but if this film is any indication, bourgeois filmmaking is here to stay.

IF EVER THERE WAS a turnip-headed scarecrow on the verge of metamorphosis, it’s Bruno Ganz, whose career is being celebrated at the Harvard Film Archive in the ongoing "Matters of Life and Death: The Films of Bruno Ganz." It’s an apt title, for few other actors, European or otherwise, spend as much time ruminating on those two verities. No face seems more suited to observing the quotidian and the eternal. Ganz’s tiny eyes gaze rapt and bewildered, and his mouth, in a shovel-sized face with a nose like a battered shoe, twists in doubt, angst, or exaltation. Something is up, he’s helpless to resist, and it will change him whether he likes it or not.

Despite his wandering eyes, Ganz at heart would like to play the family man. Like poor Jonathan Harker in Werner Herzog’s hammy and profound Murnau updating, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht/Nosferatu the Vampyre (1978; June 10 at 7 p.m.). Here’s a guy who can’t take a hint. Wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), racked with nightmares of bats, warns him that something dreadful is about to happen. When his employer, Mr. Renfield (Roland Topor), sends him on a trip to sell a property to Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski), Jonathan ignores the man’s lunatic giggles. Terrified Gypsies cannot divert him from his task, and the glowing white fanged globe of his client’s head at last seems seductive, even comforting. When you come down to it, Harker is the creepier of the two.

Ganz is more observant in Swiss director Kurt Gloor’s brutally sardonic Der Erfinder/The Inventor (1980; June 11 at 9 p.m. and June 13 at 7 p.m.), and that proves his downfall as well. He’s a Swiss peasant, pacifist, and socialist who inquires deeper into the nature of things than his fellows and is regarded as a bit of a loony, even by his supportive wife. He sees the local count’s car get stuck once again in the mud and thinks, "What if a wagon could be made that carries its own road with it? It would make the world a better place, would it not?" The treachery of human nature sees to it that it doesn’t as his invention adds to the ongoing horrors of World War I and earns the inventor a diabolical fate.

Gloor would commit suicide. Ganz, though, lives on. His character in Die Fälschung/Circle of Deceit (1981; June 13 at 9 p.m. and June 14 at 7 p.m.) observes the world but vows not to get involved. That includes his wife and family; a war correspondent, he flees home for the refuge of the civil war in Beirut. Director Volker Schlondörff created the first and greatest masterpiece about post-modern warfare, its random banality and ubiquity, and about the ease with which the media commodify the unthinkable. Seeing this film when it first came out, with its images of incinerated bodies in BMWs, of families splayed out dead in their living room next to Polaroids of themselves in happier days, I thought, "This is the way the world ends." In fact, it was the way the world would continue.

Can observant non-involvement be taken further? Ganz plays Paul, a mechanic on a tanker ship, "a huge, floating factory," in Alain Tavernier’s hypnotic and unnerving Dans la ville blanche/In the White City (1983; June 11 at 7 p.m. and June 14 at 9 p.m.). The ship docks in Lisbon; Paul disembarks, enters a bar where the clock is running backward, and is never quite the same. He loves his wife back home in Switzerland, and he mails her Super-8 films of winding, climbing streets that reach nowhere. He also loves the chambermaid at the hotel where he’s staying. Nothing much happens, for Paul wants to achieve utter immobility and impassivity. What does happen, though, transforms him utterly, and perhaps the viewer as well.

After the near non-existence of In the White City, the Olympian detachment of Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin/Wings of Desire (1987; June 15 at 7 p.m.) must have been a breeze. As the angel Damiel, Ganz is assigned to spend eternity listening to endless monologues written by Wenders and co-scenarist Peter Handke. No wonder he opts for mortality. But I’m being unfair. Some of the overlapping, quietly desperate voiceovers of the Berliners Damiel and fellow seraph/voyeur Cassiel (Otto Sander) adoringly acknowledge match the visual poetry of cinematographer Henri. "Alekan" is also the name of the circus in which trapeze artiste Solveig Dommartin plies her art, the sight of which has Damiel resolving to wake up and smell the coffee and see the world in Technicolor.

As he tells Cassiel before his fall, Damiel wants more than anything else to be able to take his shoes off under a table and wiggle his toes. The outcome doesn’t smell too good in Gillian Armstrong’s The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992; June 21 at 7 p.m. and June 22 at 9 p.m.). As Jean-Pierre, a French émigré in Sydney, he’s wiggling his toes but having renewed difficulty with domesticization and commitment. Married to a neurotic feminist, he enjoys the homely comforts of food and indulgence but doesn’t draw the line when his wife’s younger sister moves in.

Ganz settles more fully into earthly contentment and the unquestioned gratification of the senses in Wenders’s sequel to Himmel, In weiter Ferne, so nah!/Faraway, So Close (1993; June 15 at 9:15 p.m.). Here he’s become a parody of himself, a pizza maker who sings opera while making deliveries on his bike, exuding sentimentality. The focus, however, is on Cassiel, who’s tempted to take the earthly plunge not for an individual woman but for humanity. With such high-minded stakes involved, the film has to be a farce, and overlong at that.