‘From Inside Out – The Architecture of Peter Zumthor’ Review: Wim Wenders Pushes 3D Further With Relaxed Documentary

As the saying goes, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Most read that line as an expression of folly. Wim Wenders, however, treats it as a checklist. Having already delivered genre-defining documentaries on music (“Buena Vista Social Club”) and dance (“Pina”), the German filmmaker now checks off a third discipline with “From Inside Out — The Architecture of Peter Zumthor,” which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival. (Literature, presumably, will be next.) Wenders’ latest figures to draw a narrower audience given the inherent austerity of its subject. That’s not a criticism, merely a statement of fact: stripped of movement and melody, appreciating architecture is a far more sober pleasure. And here is a sober film — tricked out in top-notch 3D and backed by no less than Brad Pitt — that proves easier to describe than to critique. On its own terms, “From Inside Out — The Architecture of Peter Zumthor” succeeds wildly; it’s just that those terms make it about as niche as niche gets. To amend another familiar maxim: beaming about “Zumthor” might be the hardest job of all. To mark his latest stereoscopic feature, Wenders now brings his camera to… spaaaaaace! Alas, not the intergalactic variety so memorably honored by that Tim Curry line reading circulating anew, but the no-less-impressive, otherworldly interiors dreamed up by a Swiss-German visionary high in the Alps. Description aside, the unassuming architect is more Opa than Bond villain, which underscores one of the central fascinations of Wenders’ wider foray into the format. More than most of his contemporaries, Wenders has shown a deep curiosity about 3D as a filmmaking tool, along with a fierce determination to decouple the gimmick from spectacle — and thus from contrivance, like a suffix (“…in three-deeee!”) tacked on to justify a premium. He tried it on for a melodrama, falling flat with the largely forgotten James Franco and Rachel McAdams vehicle “Every Thing Will Be Fine,” and on fine-art appreciation with 2023’s “Anselm,” which grossed nearly three times as much with a far less starry cast. (Must have been the premium format upcharge.) “From Inside Out — The Architecture of Peter Zumthor” marks Wenders’ most radical — and, in a certain way, most relaxed — experiment to date. Here, the filmmaker uses his stereoscopic tool to simply deepen the image, letting Zumthor’s designs speak for themselves in what amounts to a luxury travelogue channeling the same aesthetic ethos as its subject. Perhaps because Zumthor’s biography isn’t all that extraordinary, the film turns instead to his more sublime work: minimalist, brutalist, often horizontal constructions that sprawl across vast expanses, commenting on and, in Zumthor’s own words, often meant to “complete” preexisting natural and urban landscapes. Those long curious about Zumthor’s monumental constructions in Germany and Norway will luxuriate in a film that itself luxuriates and lingers. Those who wouldn’t otherwise plan a European getaway around architectural gawking would be best advised to steer clear. As it happens, American interest in Zumthor may be higher now than it has ever been (or ever will be) thanks to the recent opening of his David Geffen Galleries in Los Angeles, a design that engulfs Wilshire Boulevard at one end and bubbles up against the La Brea Tar Pits at the other. The curving building famously takes no sides, creating an amorphous open space that is rigidly non-hierarchical, with different cultures, time periods and means of expression sharing the same plane. Wenders, on the other hand, gives that latest construction the pride of place, devoting the film’s final act to the project’s conception, construction and recent ribbon-cutting, with cameo pop-ins from the likes of Werner and Lena Herzog and Ava DuVernay. Yet future visitors to the David Geffen Galleries, which houses LACMA’s permanent collection, will likely be as interested — if not more — in the art on display, underscoring a fundamental tension in a film that hinges on, and in fact requires, a greater fascination with the building itself. To his credit, the filmmaker recognizes as much. As in a travel show, each new sight comes with its own special guest — writers and musicians like Siri Hustvedt, Sophie Hunger and Aoi Yamada, brought in to stage a kind of dialogue between performer and place. It’s an interesting, fitfully compelling attempt to “open up” the film by smuggling movement and melody back into the mix. But the effort struggles against headwinds simply too strong, unable to light a spark in a subject whose appeal will inherently remain confined to a self-selecting few. Then again, what else did you expect? You know what they say about dancing to architecture.