Depending on your mood, this movie is either great or extremely boring.

In the right mood, this is an existential movie that speaks very deeply about the sheer beauty of embodied existence --- especially when it comes to love expressed physically. The movie is very good at hinting at the poetry and longing of the everyday that we often neglect in the midst of our preoccupations and problems.

But on the wrong mood, this is a movie about the pretentious young people of the 1980s elevating their smallest emotional turmoils to existential heights, as if their tiniest experiences were somehow of supreme significance.

The plot is straightforward enough: an angel tasked with observing and recording human experience envies their ability to experience embodied life. Because he so envies this in them, he cannot fathom how humans can so easily miss the immense poetry of their being. The angel falls in love with a trapeze artist, and so, one day, he becomes human in order to both experience life as they do, and to find and love this woman.

Of course, in this movie, the experience of angels in the infinite presence of God is never even attempted to be shown, and so the viewer is led to side with the angel's description of human experience as inherently superior. In the American remake (City of Angels), at least some attempt is made to show that there is a choice involved here, and that an angel's experience has something going for it as well. That being said, however, the American remake does not do a great job of showing the intensity of embodied longing shown in this movie.

As expressed before, this movie is either existentially great, or boringly long, depending on your mood.