With The American Friend, Wenders exudes calculated confidence in his Hitchcockian visuals and New Wave-inspired scene-building, but leaves so much absent in terms of plot and characterization that it can’t be an accident for such a masterful director. The question, then, is not where Wenders derailed, but rather, why would an artist so talented set out to make a film this dense?

The story concerns a German frame-maker diagnosed with leukemia who is drafted by a shady American art dealer to be a hit man for the mob. The idea is that, with death lingering, he’s the ideal man, a Jack Ruby, for such dangerous assignments. Even if he expires, gets nabbed or gunned down, the blood money he’s earned will healthily benefit his widowed wife and son.

This is a damn nice plot outline for a globe-spanning international thriller, but Wenders, who was and is capable of crafting a Hollywoodized action-suspense flick if he wanted to, deliberately holds back. The plot is too muddy to follow by the 20-minute mark, with usually-easy tasks like figuring out whether scenes are taking place in Hamburg or New York suddenly an outright challenge, and Wenders allows parts of the film to drag on forever with sparse dialogue or music to accompany.

The ‘70s were the renaissance of experimental cinema, resulting in an all-out transformation of how films are crafted and received, but a boring movie that takes swooping risks is still a boring movie, and The American Friend is nothing more. Wenders borrowed from various countries’ New Wave landmarks, like Jean-Pierre Melville’s soon to be John Woo-ified Le Cercle Rouge and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson in post-Chinatown cool down. But the films Wenders impersonates here had their slow style built into the story, allowing them to achieve richer characters for viewers to meditate on for years after. The American Friend plays out like photocopies, with its directionless style smothered over the plot instead of integrated into it; and while it might have pleased minimalist-crazed art houses in 1977, the film’s notorious and exhausting obtuseness lives on as a counterpoint to the decade.

Obviously, The American Friend is less a Euro-thriller than an indictment of Hollywood suspense films, where viewers (and directors) rely on music for a crutch between scenes, and where periodic plot recaps is comically wanton. In a bizarre, intentional semi-irony, Wenders cast most of the roles using other directors, some of them, like Dennis Hopper as the American art dealer, making sense, and others not, like Wenders’ friend Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause), in one of the few acting roles of his troubled life. In total, eight cast members of The American Friend have directed films in competition at Cannes, including Wenders himself, who’s had eight movies at the festival in the past 30 years.

Hopper is a plus, for once playing a subdued, yet still creepy mystery-man during the heyday of his infamous debauchery. The camerawork, too, is sharp and alive, giving the impression that every cut means something, even if every line of dialogue tangles with nothingness.

Within The American Friend is an ambiguous statement by Wenders involving the corruption of German film by Hollywood, with Hopper’s character representing the dreaded Tinseltown - wholeheartedly embracing corruption by tricking an honest German man into becoming a desperate murderer. But the question to take away from The American Friend (or more conceivably this discourse) is this: Is Wenders’ film a failure when that’s exactly what he wanted it to be?

-Shawn Wines