Sometimes, you have to put your stack of still-unwatched Blu-rays aside and revisit a favorite. I'm participating one of those Facebook “Post one favorite movie a day for 10 days” trends right now, and this one came to mind, so I decided to watch it yet again.
Travis, a scraggly drifter played by Harry Dean Stanton, walks out of a southwestern desert, dressed in a red baseball cap, a dust-covered suit, a tie, and tattered shoes. He enters a ramshackle saloon, loses consciousness, and falls to the ground. Travis's brother, played by Dean Stockwell, drives from Los Angeles to retrieve his disheveled sibling, only to find that Travis, who simply stares silently and unresponsively with haunted eyes into the horizon, has no explanation for why he has been missing for the past four years.
Upon being brought to Los Angeles and finding out that Hunter, his seven year-old son, has been taken in by his brother and his sister-in-law after having been abandoned years ago by his estranged wife, Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, Travis gradually earns the trust of the boy while staying with the family and studying old photographs and Super 8 film footage with a grief-stricken fascination. When he decides to travel to Houston in order to find Jane, his choices in the days that follow change the lives of everyone involved.
The title of the 1984 Wim Wenders film,
Paris, Texas, evokes a sense of cognitive dissonance, because, even though the town is an actual place, our minds instinctively grapple with images and perceptions of two disparate locations on different continents. This off-kilter aesthetic permeates every aspect of the movie. Early in the story, we are introduced to a German doctor who resides in rural Texas. Travis's brother, Walt, as portrayed by Stockwell, comes across as an all-American everyman, but he is married to an exotic French woman, played wonderfully by Aurore Clément. A scene with Travis polishing and lining up the family's shoes resembles an image from a Yasujirō Ozu Japanese film, and it stands out in contrast to the wide open spaces of the American west and the slide guitar music score by Ry Cooder. Much of this movie deals with travel, and the night scenes of characters stopping by lonely roadside diners, phone booths, and city buildings are bathed in a green neon glow. Wenders, a German director, showcases Americana landscapes with a genuine sense of awe, but certain ingredients feel out of place, and not a moment passes by when we do not realize that we are observing an outsider's idea of this country.
I first saw
Paris, Texas roughly a decade ago, long after the 1980s had passed, and my primary reaction was one of gleeful nostalgia for the era captured by the movie, an era when the sight of children riding in the beds of pickup trucks on busy highways was commonplace, when walkie-talkies seemed like cutting edge technology, when two people could communicate with walkie-talkies while stationed at opposite sides of a metropolitan bank and not be arrested within minutes by suspicious policemen, and when billboards that hover over the highways were created with a hands-on artistic attention to detail. With each subsequent viewing, however, I grew to love how the film immerses us in the stories of Stanton's Travis and Kinski's Jane without passing judgment on their behavior or life decisions. The narrative provides multiple callbacks to John Ford's iconic 1956 western,
The Searchers, which also dealt with an antihero who returns a child to a home before retreating alone into the unknown, but Wenders is more concerned simply with allowing us to gaze at length into the lives of lost souls. The opening shots show Travis as a tiny figure in the middle of a vast open desert under the sun, but revelations and heartbreak draw us in until we finally observe him up close in a darkened room as he speaks with Jane from the other side of a one-way mirror.
When Harry Dean Stanton passed away in 2017 at the age of 91, I posted on Facebook that the world had become a significantly less cool place. I've always loved how his roles always seemed particularly tailored to his appearance, which could best be described as lean, beleaguered, and world-weary, but ultimately affable. His role as a blue-collar spaceship laborer in
Alien, his role as Molly Ringwald's father in
Pretty in Pink, his fantastic part as Bud in
Repo Man, his hitchhiker scenes in
Two-Lane Blacktop, his moments as an ill-fated father in the original
Red Dawn, and even his cameo in
The Avengers all exuded a comfortably "lived-in" appearance, almost like an unkempt mechanic who has been working at the same car shop down the street for 40 years, but who always has a pleasant spark in his eye.
Paris, Texas is Stanton at his best, though. Although he does not utter a word for the first half hour of this movie, he conveys so much with mannerisms and mournful expressions. Even late in the film, when he gives an extended monologue of sorts, a sense of nuanced mystery rules all, and we find out just enough about his character to spark our curiosity and imagination.
Nastassja Kinski, who captured my childhood heart with her role in the 1982 horror remake,
Cat People, is one of cinema's great beauties, and, in this film, her appearance benefits from a delayed buildup, in the style of Harry Lime in
The Third Man, where her Jane character is introduced to us by way of multiple scenes of other people talking about her before she is finally seen in a crude sunlit Super 8 video. When Jane finally does show up in person in all her lovely blonde glory in the seedy sex club establishment, however, she is depicted in an uncannily low-key way almost in the background while the camera fixates primarily on Travis and his reactions as he is talking to her by telephone inside a peep show booth. The ensuing conversation is one of my absolute favorite character dialogue interactions, as Travis and Jane speak to each other from opposite sides of the mirror, with her bathed in light and him enshrouded in darkness, as if to accentuate the tragic emotional gulf between them that will never again be bridged. Jane's body language and her first signs of recognition when she realizes that she is talking to her old lover are for the ages.
At the end of
Paris, Texas, I always want so much more. I want to know the backstory of how the middle-aged Travis met and fell in love with the younger Jane. I want to know what eventually became of the son, Hunter, played by Hunter Carson in a brilliant child actor portrayal, after the final events shown on screen. I want to know if Hunter ever saw his old family again later on. I want to know how Stockwell's Walt first met his French wife. I want to know everything that happened between the idyllic Super 8 vacation footage of the five main characters and Travis's emergence from the desert. In the end, though, all that I have is the blend of joy and sorrow, as dissimilar as the two locations that come to mind from the movie title, as a tearful character drives alone into the night, understanding that, while the fractured pieces of something once beautiful can never be put together again, hope may still be salvaged from the ruins.
Paris, Texas is a tremendous and visually spectacular motion picture that holds more hypnotic power over me with each viewing.
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