28 YEARS ON, "PARIS, TEXAS" HAS ONLY GROWN IN POWER.
(and still makes me want to call my Dad)
Although it won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes festival in 1984, I didn't get to see Paris, Texas until nearly a year later when it debuted at the Lido, Auckland's then premier art house cinema. I was in my first year at university and keen to advance my polo neck wearing/Leonard Cohen listening intellectual persona. I was therefore especially pleased to see a sprinkling of university staff (albeit librarians) amongst the sold out crowd at the first Friday night screening. My father, though, insisted on coming with me, not, I hasten to add, because he shared my interest in World Cinema, but because he considered anyone who went to the cinema by themselves as 'weird' and intended to save me from certain social death. 10 minutes into the film, my father was snoring, Snoring so loudly in fact, that the people in the row in front of us were turning around to see what the horrible noise was. I decided that a quick dig in the ribs was in order which provoked a very loud "WHA WHA WHA WHAT?" as he was jolted awake. More tutting now from the rows before and aft."Shh,"I hissed, "You were snoring."
"Well, it's boring isn't it,"was my father's belligerent reply. I sat for the rest of the 148 minute running time with my cheeks burning with embarrassment and after that night he was happy to let me go to the pictures by myself. Granted Paris, Texas is a slow film and the opening 10 minutes featuring a mute Harry Dean Stanton walking in the desert is a tough ask for your usual multiplex audience, but it is a film that rewards your patience and persistence. I didn't come across the film again until 6 years later, when it was on T.V. one night. Although seduced again by its imagery, I turned it off, deciding I was too tired to do it justice. Now, a further 12 years on, I sat down again to watch it on DVD and was immediately struck by how much of the film had stayed with me. This, I suspect, is largely due to Ry Cooder's soundtrack, which I have played virtually continuously for nigh on three decades now. Nothing evokes wide open spaces, big skies and empty roads quite like Cooder's spare, melancholy guitar. This is frontier music that speaks of the long, lonely stretch of highway that runs from hick town to nowhere and back again. Americans, Australians and New Zealanders can identify with it immediately - though it's slightly more of a stretch if you live in densely populated Europe.
Wim Wenders is obviously a director interested in geography and space. Wings of Desire (a black and white love letter to Berlin, 1988) and The Buena Vista Social Club (a vibrant musical memoir, 1999) are evocative portraits of cities and communities - joyous even amidst the political, social or economic upheaval of their backstories. Even, the documentary Pina (2011), noted for its innovative use of 3D technology, is equally startling for the locations in which the dances are staged. In Paris, Texas, Wenders's outsider's eye renders the clichés of the roadside diners and motels fresh again. Wenders and D.o.P. Robbie Müller capture the grandeur of the Mojave Desert but also bring the same sense of awe to the sprawling suburbs of L.A. and the glass canyons of downtown Houston. In some ways, Paris, Texas is the quintessential road movie as it criss crosses the continent from New Mexico to California and on to Texas, but it's journeys are also metaphorical and inward. Key scenes take place in moving vehicles or under motorway flyovers. When the film does stop in L.A. in the second act, the airport and motorway feature prominently. Watching the film again I was reminded of Don McGlashan's line: Everyone was on their way and thinking they're already there. The characters in Paris, Texas are in literal and emotional transit.
What an emotionally resonant film it is. When the film begins, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) is found in the desert having been reported missing 4 years before. His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), arrives and brings him back to L. A. where he, and his French wife, Anne (Aurore Clement), have been caring for Hunter, Travis's son, ever since he and his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski) disappeared. Travis begins to come out of his catatonic state and makes his first tentative steps at reconnecting with 8 year old Hunter, who is understandably confused at arrival of this "new" Dad. But the journey is not complete and Travis sets off again, this time with Hunter in tow, to find Jane. Those expecting a feel good ending though will be disappointed as Travis knows that the damage that he has wrought on the family can not be undone. At the centre of the film is a monstrous act of domestic abuse (revealed in the famous "I knew these people" monologue towards the end of the film) which means that this family can never be reunited. Travis can seek retribution (4 years in the desert) or ask for forgiveness but he can not take things back to how they were. In the end he decides to reunite mother and child and move on. Sam Sheperd's matter of fact dialogue, the restraint of the direction (there are no flashbacks to the violence recounted) and the subtle underplaying of Stanton and Kinski turn this into a family drama of enduring power. The film contrasts starkly with mainstream Hollywood depictions of trauma and fractured families which trade in sentimental manipulation at the expense of emotional veracity - the most egregious recent example being Stephen Daldry's Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close (2011). Now 87, Harry Dean Stanton remains America's great unsung hero of character acting and this is perhaps his finest performance. Kinski is equally fine. Although she spent most of the 80's adorning magazine covers wearing little more than a snake, or being used as Euro eye candy by dodgy auteurs Paul Schrader and Roman Polanski, Paris, Texas and Mike Figgis's overlooked One Night Stand (1997) prove that she is, in fact, an actress of range and depth.
Eschewing Hollywood histrionics, Wenders uses colour and composition to tell the emotional story and the film is all the more moving for it - full of startling images from the piercing orange of a thunderstorm at sunset, the eerie, cool neon green that engulfs Travis at the end of the film to Kinski's iconic pink sweater. Colour also connects to character. Travis's red cap or the red shirts that father and son wear on the trail of the missing mother figure in a red car are important motifs throughout the film. On the couch, in their matching red t-shirts, Travis tells Hunter about how his own father's idealisation of his mother - how the joke about her coming from Paris...Texas quickly wore thin, revealing the impossibility of living up to romantic expectations. Travis realises his own delusions - his love for Jane was undeniable - it's just he could never reconcile it with the demands of real life. When Jane is reunited with Hunter, mother and son are both dressed in calming green - the light that also bathes Travis watching from the car park below.There has been a lot of hyperbole this week surrounding the release of the new Richard Curtis film, About Time - a smug, rich person's remake of Groundhog Day and sentimental father/son love story. As I found one of the writer director's previous efforts - Love, Actually - to be one of the most emotionally dishonest films ever made, I will probably give it a miss. For me, Paris, Texas, with it's splintered family and damaged patriarch trying to put it right is the film that makes me want to call my father. But then as my Dad will probably tell you, I was always a bit weird.
Paris, Texas by Ry Cooder.
Paris, Texas is available now on DVD and Blu Ray
For more on the film go to Wim Wenders's website:
http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/paristexas/paris_texas.htm
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