Paris, Texas
Road Movie • 147 Minutes • France, West Germany, United States • 1984
Director: Wim Wenders • Produced by: Anatole Dauman, Don Guest • Written by: L. M. Kit Carson, Sam Shepard • Starring: Harry Dean Stanton, Nastassja Kinski, Dean Stockwell, Aurore Clément, Hunter Carson, Bernhard Wicki, Socorro Valdez • Music by: Ry Cooder • Cinematography: Robby Müller • Edited by: Peter Przygodda
A man with glassy eyes and a fixed gait wanders out of the desert somewhere in the vicinity of West Texas. He’s dishevelled, wearing a dusty chalk-stripe suit and a battered red baseball cap, his skin has wilted and fractured in the heat, and he’s in desperate need of water. Traipsing into a gas station, he spurns a fridge full of beer, and chomps down on some ice cubes as the proprietor keeps schtum in the corner.
When the man subsequently collapses, presumably out of exhaustion, the proprietor taps him with his foot for good measure. He is handed over to an extortionate German doctor, who at least manages to get in touch with the man’s brother. Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) was introduced against a backdrop of blue skies and sandstone buttes, but his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) wears a yellow Stetson cap and stands in front of a commercial tower block, which turns out to be painted. He sells billboard signs for a living, but agrees to travel to Terlingua, South Texas, to pick up his brother.
Travis remains in a fugue state, mute and prone to wandering. He seems drawn towards train tracks and transmission lines and he refuses to shower. Finally he accepts a blue plaid shirt, and on the long enforced drive back to Walt’s home in Los Angeles, he mutters the word ‘Paris’, which Walt presumes refers to the capital of France, but in fact relates to a plot of land which Travis has bought in the town of Paris, Texas. Travis believes that he may have been conceived there, and he appears to be on some sort of quest, seeking rebirth, some place free from pretence or where he can start to rebuild a sense of self and his own shattered illusions. Maybe he just wants to settle.
It turns out that Travis has a son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), who is now seven years old and for the past four years has been living with Walt and his wife Anne in Los Angeles. Travis and the boy’s biological mother, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), had a falling out which Walt and Anne tread tentatively around and to which Travis will only refer obliquely.
Slowly between school walks and home movies Travis begins to reconnect with his son. Anne (Aurore Clément) – somewhere between siren and ingénue with her thick French accent, someone who orchestrates the action then watches rapt and helpless as events unfold around her, who shares a fond and strangely familiar bond with Travis – fears the loss of Hunter, who she regards as her son, but she discloses Jane’s whereabouts to Travis. So Travis takes the boy to Houston, for a slow and fairly sombre sort of escapade full of peep shows and surreptitious two-way receivers, where the outcome feels at once free to be formed and strangely predestined.
Paris, Texas is a quiet movie full of contradictions that feel quaint rather than uneasy. The two-storey stuccoed house in the suburbs of Los Angeles where Walt, Anne, and Hunter live, overlooking several highways, feels more substantial and authentic than the locales of West Texas and downtown Houston, beautifully shot but impalpable places with their potted pylons and hotels and one-way mirrors.
The cinematography by director Wim Wenders and cinematographer Robby Müller is by turns graceful and garish, the rusty tones and wide vistas of the daytime giving way during interior scenes and at night to neon lights and discordant combinations of red, green, and blue which cast shadows and cut across sets and characters without ever feeling too gross or unnatural. In La Berceuse series of paintings which similarly juxtapose red and green, Vincent van Gogh sought motherly comfort but also imagined his canvases adorning the cabin walls of Icelandic fishing vessels.
Paris, Texas evokes the iconic forms of American cinema, from films noir like Detour and Vertigo to grandiose Westerns like The Searchers and Lonely Are the Brave, at the same time as it calls forth a new wave of postmodern filmmaking from slacker movies to the surrealism of David Lynch and Blue Velvet. Yet it is as different from any of those films as James Stewart’s obsessive anxiousness, John Wayne’s steely about-turn glare, Kirk Douglas’s brashness, Kyle MacLachlan’s creeping curiosity, or a hyperventilating Dennis Hopper are from the easygoing smirk and plaintive sturdiness of Harry Dean Stanton.
It is difficult to imagine anyone other than Stanton pulling off the tightrope act that the role of Travis entails: the playfulness bordering on waifishness and childishness that Travis displays when Carmelita the maid directs his portrayal of a rich father, or when he walks home with Hunter, strutting and frolicking on the other side of the street; the rough-hewn quality which allied to a certain tentativeness and mournfulness make him resolutely an outsider, even while his looks and an innate tactility make him close to Anne and a plausible partner for Jane. Travis is gentle but a little bit petulant and self-absorbed, and seems buffeted by the wind even as he bolts against it.
The relationship between Travis and Walt is fond and respectful though fraught with things left unsaid, while the relationship between Travis and Anne hangs ripe with possibility. Wim Wenders consciously sought to ‘tell a story about America’, but through Travis and Jane, Walt and Anne, and the Parisian namesake, Paris, Texas operates on a mythic plane and retains a transatlantic thrust. Every scene is impeccably framed, Ry Cooder’s score rumbles and hums, and the screenplay by L. M. Kit Carson and Sam Shepard maintains an overt three-part structure, from the brotherly road trip through Texas, to the rekindling in Los Angeles, to events in Houston which serve as dégringolade as much as denouement.
Yet in the end Paris, Texas doesn’t really amount to anything, which might as well be the point. When Travis has navigated the seedy club and returns to sit opposite Jane, the shared history he recounts is no more particular than it is abstract and mythic. Travis is aware that the same story could apply to pretty much anyone. He seems to have unburdened himself more when in an earlier conversation with Hunter he recalls his own mother, plain and good, and his sick father, who looked without seeing.
