The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty

Wim Wenders, West Germany, 1971, 101 minutes

If you always suspected that football was in fact a fascinating paradigm of the human condition, this could be the film for you. Apparently, the goalkeeper is intellectually the most interesting player on the football pitch. Wim Wenders' debut feature is a couple of hours in the life of one such keepen an archetypally alienated "existential" hero, even deeper than Eric Cantona. He wanders through the film a spectator of his own actions, as unaware of what he'll do next as we are, having seemingly given up hope of working out a best plan of action. Somewhere along the way an unplanned murder "happens" by his hand; and if you spot the similarities with Meursault in L'Etranger, it's probably no coincidence that Albert Camus did a bit of goal-keeping on the side.

The script is a rather loose adaptation of a short novel by Peter Handke whose German title: Die Angst des Tomanns beim Elfmeter has a bit more credibility than its rather silly English equivalent.

The budget is nothing compared to Wenders' more recent megabucks blockbusters such as Until The End Of The World or Faraway, So Close - the sets here look as though they failed to make the grade for Prisoner Cell Block H, and one can only assume the heavy-handed editing is Wenders' homage to the French New Wave masters. The film is not without influence of its own though - "Beat Takeshi does for baseball in Boiling Point what Wenders did here for football, even starting and ending with a match. For a first feature here the lad from Germany's played a blinder.

Review by Philip Kelley
Taken from EUFS Programme 1994-95