1971. Christmas Eve. Lansa Flight 508 leaves Lima airport bound for Pucallpa, a town in the Amazon rain-forest. While attempting to avoid a storm, a bolt of lightning hits one of the aircraft's fuel tanks and shears off a wing. The plane tumbles toward the Peruvian forest, eventually crashing and killing 92 passengers and crew.
As the plane disintegrates, Juliane Koepcke, seventeen years old, is thrown from its fuselage. She plunges tens of thousands of feet, her chair spiralling wildly, inadvertently acting like a propeller and so creating up-thrust. Cushioned further by a thick jungle canopy, Juliane, incredulously, lands gently to the ground. She is the incident's only survivor.
Hours earlier filmmaker Werner Herzog, attempting to get into the jungles to shoot scenes for a film ("Aguirre, Wrath of God"), tries and fails to book a seat on the same flight. Had he been allowed on Lansa 508, he too would have died.
Decades later Herzog contacts Juliane and offers to take her back to her crash site as part of his documentary, "Wings of Hope". She agrees. "He helped me towards working through my past," Juliane would say of Herzog. "His empathetic questions and his ability to truly listen, as well as the chance to return to the site of my terror, were the best therapy."
"Wings of Hope" wastes no time introducing us to Juliane. Though now in her late 40s, the scars of her ordeal are still evident. She's an introverted, perpetually shell-shocked woman, her eyes glazed over, her body tense and always on edge. Herzog takes her on a recreation of her journey, covering everything from Flight 508's crash to Juliane's miraculous, ten day trek through the Amazonian bush. Because Juliane's parents – her mother died in the crash - were biologists, the girl was somewhat able to cope with her jungle ordeal. She may have suffered a concussion, broken collarbone and sported maggot infected gashes on the arms and legs, but Juliane was nevertheless smart enough to follow a river downstream with the hope of finding civilisation. And so for ten days she walked and waded, using her jungle-smarts to avoid sting-rays, piranhas, alligators, jaguars, snakes and spiders. Still, the jungle took a toll. Hundreds of bugs burrowed into her body, cold rains invoked pneumonia and her thin mini-skirt offered neither warmth nor protection. Days later Juliane stumbles upon hunters. They describe the half-dead, starving girl as a ghost, her body swollen, bloodied and battered.
Herzog's films typically deal with a wild and lawless Nature either engulfing men or driving them to insanity. Here the man/Nature battle swings wildly back and forth. It is human arrogance that leads to the little girl falling out of the skies, and it is the leafy arms of trees which cushion her fall and ensure her survival. But the forest that saves then quickly turns into Juliane's prisoner. She battles it for ten days, before, on the verge of death, she emerges. Ironically, Juliane would become a biologist and return to the Peruvian jungles to study insects, birds and bats. Her parents were similarly biologists, dedicating their lives to learn, conserve and care for that which tore their family apart.
Herzog constructs haunting little moments throughout the film. Early scenes focus on battered mannequins in clothing stores, images which conjure up the mutilated victims of Flight 508. Later we step into Juliane's biological museum, with its preserved, dead and embalmed bodies and carcasses. Juliane – a woman who's seemingly risen from a tomb – too seems to be in a preserved state, her body calcified; she's your typical Herzog protagonist, both survivor and mad man. One great shot focuses on a found piece of wreckage: the aircraft's twin wheels, quietly resting in the jungle and overrun with moss and bush. A traumatized Juliane can barely look at the object. Other scenes highlight a different form of horror: the socioeconomic reality of life in Peru, the tale of a fisherman who sells his gun because he can't afford boat fare, and stories of an airline that relentlessly cuts costs (and safety measures) to make a buck.
The film's last passage approaches the sublime. Here we're introduced to the fisherman who saved Juliane's life. She calls him her angel. A God. A tool of divine intervention. But he limps pathetically, having recently been lanced by a string-ray. But Herzog always finds the spiritual in the pathetic. Final scenes consist of a dream sequence scored by Wagner's "Das Rheingold", in which Juliane's thankful narration is ironically juxtaposed with shots of Juliane's saviour, who hops on one leg and struggles to climb a small hill, even when assisted by three villagers. "Nothing can be reversed," Herzog says, as his camera retraces Juliane's "fall" through the door of Flight 508. "But all of the sudden she beholds an angel engulfed in light. All fear departs from her..."
The scene, of course, sums up the last four decades of Herzog: here's mankind crippled in the face of a malevolent jungle, and so relying, always relying, on a little help from his fellowman. Man's angels limp? Then send more. Or choose a less steep hill.
"Wings of Hope" is typically classified as a "documentary", but of course Herzog's "documentaries" and "feature films" often smudge fiction and documentation. Herzog himself spends much of "Hope" engaging in his now customary metaphysical musings. While his later work invites parody because of this, "Hope" remains sad and affecting, with a healthy respect for a horrible event which both Juliane and Herzog know they can not even begin to communicate.
Incidentally, Terrence Malick's "The New World" shamelessly "borrows" Herzog's "Das Rheingold" sequences. "Malick called me and apologised," Werner Herzog says.
8.5/10 - Worth one viewing.
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