“The second of the three Wenders road movies (Alice in the Cities ('74), Kings of the Road ('75)--all star Rudiger Vogler), Wrong Movement has a script by Peter Handke that drastically alters its basis, Goethe's ‘Wilhelm Meister': the journey along the North Sea, Rhine, Alps serves to block any possibility of creative activity; ‘I'd like to be a writer, but is that possible if I have no interest in people?' Wilhelm writes in his journal.
“It seems an unusual project for Wenders. It places unusual weight on contemplative dialogue, and deals with a group of people rather than one or two individuals (Wilhelm drifts with other disconnected figures: an actress, an acrobat, a poet, an ex-Nazi, a suicidal industrialist). But the film's concerns are familiar: their rootlessness, their inability to communicate (with each other, with their country's past, with the prevalent postwar American culture), and the ‘dead soul of Germany.' Before hanging himself, the industrialist talks about loneliness: ‘It seems to me that it's more hidden and at the same time more painful than elsewhere. Maybe because of the propagation of virtues like courage meant to distract attention from fear. Fear here is considered vain and shameful. Thus it is that loneliness in Germany is marked over, by all those treacherous, soulless faces that haunt supermarkets, leisure centers and fitness clubs. The dead soul of Germany.'
“Critic Robin Wood had this reaction to Wrong Movement: ‘Seeing Wrong Movement...one experiences that shock of recognition of an achieved and assured individual voice...I'm sure it's the work of a major director.'” --Richard Kwietniowski