Paris, Texas (1984)

Director: Wim Wenders

Paris, Texas (1984) is one of those rare films that captivates from the very first shots, leaving a strange and uneasy feeling that constantly attaches to us. The story is masterfully conceived by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and magnificently photographed by Robby Müller in the desert of Arizona. Ry Cooder‘s acoustic guitar is part of the heavy and hot atmosphere that envelopes the desert landscapes. With just a couple of vibrant chords that seem to vanish in the leaden air, Cooder manages to ignite deep emotions and cuts our breaths.

The starting point is a truly dazzling scene: in the middle of some impressive shots of the Arizona desert, a man appears walking in a straight line, with a somewhat disturbing fixation. It seems that he is walking aimlessly, but at the same time very decisively. Thus, the film begins with several questions: Who is that individual? Where is he going? And what has happened to him? The man enters a bar and suddenly loses consciousness. When he recovers, he refuses to speak, and it seems like his memory and speech are gone. A doctor checks his belongings and discovers that his name is Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton). He also finds a phone number, which belongs to his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell). After getting a call, Walt travels to go see Travis. When they finally meet again, Travis is still in a catatonic state, trying to escape several times to resume his obsessive and mysterious walk. Walt is determined that Travis can reinsert himself through a civilizing process: he finally manages to take him home to Los Angeles, constantly trying to remind him, between reproach and lamentation, that he was gone for 4 entire years, abandoning his young son Hunter (Hunter Carson). Walt and his wife Anne (Aurore Clément) have cared for Hunter since Travis’s wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski) has also disappeared without a trace.

Once in Los Angeles, Travis is received with affection by his sister-in-law Anne, but with a little more reluctance by his son Hunter, whose discursive sagacity has turned him into a child with impressive mature reflections. This meeting marks an abrupt change in the configuration of the story, changing from being a road film to a family drama with a formidable and complex emotional background. Travis tries to get closer to Hunter, while he also manages to recover part of his vanished memories and human characteristics. When he begins to regain Hunter’s trust, Travis finds out that the boy’s mother Jane sends money regularly to help support Hunter. Travis decides to follow the track of Jane, so that his son has the opportunity to meet his mother again. The heartwarming journey eclipses into one of the most interesting moments in the film, which is a long dialogue without interruptions between Jane and Travis. This is a long sequence in which these actors perform some portentous performances that get the maximum emotional involvement of the viewer in the story. In this dialogue, we learn about the mysterious reasons that led the couple to break up and abandon the family. The most striking thing about this scene is the length and precision of the dialogue, which Wenders dared to shoot without fear of losing the audience’s attention. Wenders endowed this scene with an unmitigated dramatic force, in which the viewer can delve into the hearts and psychologies of these two characters.

If there is a central theme in this film, it is definitely the loneliness represented by a man who travels aimlessly and without a certain destination. We don’t know what he aspires to find: perhaps inner peace, or some kind of redemption. Wenders took Homer’s The Odyssey into account when he made this film. He tried to extract the theme of an endless journey that must lead to a return, a continuous search for abandoned roots and self knowledge. Travis reconnects with a past that has annihilated his soul, desperately trying to redeem himself. Leaving aside the conflicts, Wenders approaches his characters from their own human souls, and this is where the best moments of the film arise: Travis, surprised at the image of his own face in the mirror; with his brother Walt in a roadside restaurant, still unable to utter a single word but reacting with a slight smile when he talks to him about the little Hunter; Travis and Hunter looking at the Super 8 images of their happy days with Jane; the journey of father and son leaving school, imitating each other’s gestures; Hunter keeping a photo of Jane under his pillow; The outstanding “peep show scene” between Travis and Jane, and so on.

Paris, Texas is a dusty and resplendent paradise, a film that is neither form nor content, but emotion itself. An immensely powerful emotion that engulfs tears, pain, and sadness, and which leaves a state of tranquility that only the greatest pieces of art are capable to deliver.

by Octavio Carbajal González

(Read: Dave Grohl on the Paris, Texas soundtrack)