There’s a song that Annie Lennox sings – quite beautifully, in the way that she can make something mundane seem ethereal – that triggers in my mind another, completely different song.

Breakin’ the Rules is off Robbie Robertson’s second solo album, Storyville, which is simply an amazing accomplishment. Full of atmosphere and a bit melancholy, just like New Orleans, where Robertson wrote and recorded it.

I think Breakin’ the Rules appears in the Wim Wenders film, Until the End of the World, although it isn’t on the soundtrack. When I hear the song, and in particular the opening lyric, “I wrote you a letter / On Valentine’s Day,” I can see Solveig Dommartin (who plays Claire Tourneur and is wonderful) walking slowly away from Sam Neill’s Eugene Fitzpatrick and throwing back a little-girl look that let’s us know she’s going to be okay.

In fact, I think Robertson’s song is the backdrop to the film’s denouement, which may be why it’s so prominent on my internal soundtrack.

Until the End of the World is a flawed movie, to be sure, but there’s a quirky sensibility and a heartbreaking honesty to it that I love.