PARIS, TEXAS A-
France Germany Great Britain
(147 mi) 1984 d: Wim
Wenders
is it a rooster
or some woman screaming in the distance
or some woman screaming in the distance
is it black sky
or about to turn deep blue
or about to turn deep blue
is it a motel room
or someone’s house
is it the body of me
alive
or dead
or dead
is it Texas
or West Berlin
or West Berlin
what time is it
anyway
anyway
what thoughts
can I call allies
can I call allies
I pray for a break
from all thought
from all thought
a clean break
in blank space
in blank space
let me hit the road
empty-headed
empty-headed
just once
I’m not begging
I’m not getting down
on my knees
I’m in no condition to
fight
—3:30 am, from Motel Chronicles, by Sam Shepard,
December 9, 1980, Fredericksburg, Texas, Motel
Chronicles - Page 20 - Google Books Result
Winner of the Palme d’Or (1st prize) as well as a FIPRESCI
award and Ecumenical Jury prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, this joint
French-German co-production has always been viewed as a bridge between European
and American sensibilities, making it one of the few European films to succeed
on American soil, where Europeans always regarded this film with greater
affection, literally bringing tears to the receptive audience at Cannes, while
Americans tended to diminish its significance, curiously less able to see
themselves through the lens of a European director. While Europe is a collection of neighbors
living in close proximity to one another, where they’re used to directors like
Roberto Rossellini filming the devastated ruins of postwar Berlin in GERMANY
YEAR ZERO (1948), America prefers their own stamp of individualism, perhaps better
known for their wide open spaces. Following
on the success of his mid-70’s “road movies” like Kings
of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit) Road Trilogy Pt. 3 (1976), which echoes an
American tradition, the film continues Wenders’s theme of overall rootlessness,
filled with anxiety-ridden characters exiled from home and community, who
instead wander the ends of the earth seeking small comforts, where the road is often
their only friend. Wenders himself was
in a particularly restless state, having left his home in Germany to make films
in America during the 80’s, making new contacts while searching for a creative
mark of distinction that might jumpstart his career. Originally adapted from Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles, a collection of poems,
short stories, rants, and general observations, this mood of life on the run
could all be traced back to Kerouac’s epic American novel of the 50’s, On the Road, a defining work of the
budding curiosity behind a postwar generation that simply refused to be
confined to the suffocating conformism of suburban sprawl and Eisenhower era
conservatism. The postwar generation of Wenders’
Germany was undergoing their own identity crisis, drawn to American cinema and the
European art film as a model, where the alienation and modern angst of
Antonioni, perhaps best exemplified by L’AVVENTURA (1960) and RED DESERT
(1964), led to intimate portraits of restless, deeply haunted characters wandering
through bleak but beautiful landscapes, often expressed within a vague and
nearly non-existent narrative structure.
Certainly one of the loneliest films ever written, a film
that literally aches from the extent of the looming distance between characters,
reflected by the vast panoramic vistas of the American West that stretch out
into the horizon, suggesting this extraordinary amount of space is simply
impossible to fill, that humans are miniscule players on a much grander scale,
where it’s easy to get lost in the sheer immensity of it all. With a backdrop of faded ghost towns in Texas
that have literally dropped off the face of the earth, like Terlingua
(population 58) and Marathon (pop. 430), small communities of barely
populated houses huddled together, with old broken down piles of junk littering
the landscape, where perhaps there’s a bar or a breakfast café to be found, but
more than likely it’s a mere speck on the map, where it’s a wonder that
anything could survive in this dry and desolate territory in the middle of a
desert where there’s no water to be found as far as the eye can see. After driving the length of the entire
Mexican-American border, a distance of 1,500 miles, Wenders decided to shoot in
an area of Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas in
the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert that extends southwards into Mexico,
specifically in an area known as the Devil’s Graveyard, which he describes as a
“gigantic, abstract dream landscape.” Wenders
emulates the mythical qualities of John Ford in his opening sequence, setting
his lead character smack dab in the middle of an unending desert with no
conceivable signs of civilization, literally walking across a dry, scorchingly
hot wasteland that resembles the path Mexican immigrants must have followed
while following their dreams to America.
Accompanying this lone figure in the wilderness is an astonishing
bottleneck slide guitar improvisation by Ry Cooder modelled after the Blind
Willie Johnson song from 1927, “Dark Was the Night,” Blind Willie Johnson - Dark
was the night... - YouTube (3:21), heard here in a video montage tribute to
Route 66, Ry Cooder
Paris, Texas - YouTube (5:01), which Cooder describes as “the most soulful,
transcendent piece in all American music.”
While only a dot on the screen, dwarfed by the endless expanse, Harry
Dean Stanton is Travis, dressed in a worn out suit, wearing a red trucker’s cap,
carrying the last sips of water in a plastic jug, he is a man literally
returning from nowhere, seemingly with no past and no future, just drifting
through the eternity of existence.
While Stanton got his start working in various television
shows of the 50’s and 60’s, working with Monte Hellman in Two-Lane
Blacktop (1971) and COCKFIGHTER (1974), and Sam Peckinpah in Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973), after having worked together on so many
TV westerns, appearing in over 100 films, but he never had a starring role until
this film, always associated as a character actor for the unique look that he
brings, gaunt, world-weary and weather-beaten, as if he’s been out in the cold
too long. It was Shepard that chose him
for the role, where he doesn’t utter a word for the first 26-minutes of the
film, a stubborn, catatonic stranger that comes out of nowhere, a lost soul who
vanished off the face of the earth 4 years ago who is now suddenly placed in a
position to put his life back together again and reunite with his estranged
family. Wandering into an unmarked bar
and roadside café, Travis passes out, where from a phone number in his pocket, his
brother Walt (Dean Stockwell) is called to come pick him up from Los
Angeles. By the time he arrives,
however, Travis has already disappeared again, wandering back out into the
abyss, where he has to track him down following the railroad tracks. Initially Travis doesn’t even recognize him, where
there’s a degree of discomfort and disorientation that exists between them for
an extended duration, where the viewer can’t really sort it out either, but
Walt fills him in that his 7-year old son Hunter (Hunter Carson, the son of
actress Karen Black and L.M. Kit Carson, one of the co-writers of the film and
director of Dennis Hopper’s 1971 The
American Dreamer), has been living with he and his wife Anne (French
actress Aurore Clément) since he’s been gone, that when mentioned sends a jolt
through his soul. When it becomes
apparent that Travis refuses to fly, they’re forced to rent a car and drive
back to LA, becoming an extended road trip that couldn’t be more gorgeously
photographed by cinematographer Robby Müller, who shot every Wenders film since
SUMMER IN THE CITY (1970), where every landscape is utter perfection and every
wayside stop resembles a Walker Evans photograph, where the peculiarly
beautiful red sky actually exists, given a pastel neon green accompaniment,
creating surreal images, including a shot through the windshield of an orange
horizon as a storm approaches casting a fluorescent glow on a desolate hotel in
an empty street of some nameless town. Wenders
often waited around for a train that would come by once a day and frame a shot
around it, continually creating enormous space and distance between them that
parallels the seemingly unbridgeable communication gap. Out of nowhere Travis finally utters a word,
“Paris,” eventually explaining it’s a small town in Texas where he believes he
was conceived, showing his brother a photograph of an empty lot that he
purchased, perhaps hoping one day to build something on it.
By the time they get to LA, Travis remains shy and reticent,
matching Hunter’s initial feelings as well, where they may as well be
strangers, though Anne showers them both with affection, speaking through a
thick, foreign accent, but her warmness and sincerity shines through, obviously
wanting what’s best for both of them, but just what that is hasn’t materialized
yet. The location of the home is
exquisite, on a small hill overlooking the Burbank airport, where Travis loves
to position himself in the garden with a pair of binoculars watching the planes
come in and out. While it’s slow going
at first, Travis reaches out to his son, offering to walk him home after
school, but Hunter finds this a lame idea, as “nobody walks in LA”
(paraphrasing a 1982 song by Missing Persons), traveling everywhere by
car. Nonetheless, they slowly grow on
each other, accentuated by a short clip of Super 8 home movies that shows
Travis and a much younger version of Hunter with his mother Jane (Nastassja
Kinski) on the beach in Galveston, Texas with Walt and Anne, a very bright and
colorful glimpse that resembles a fantasy of pure joy and happiness, with
plenty of affection and smiles, exactly what’s missing in the present. This footage has a special charm, as it’s the
first time we see Jane, who appears indescribably happy, but it also works as a
flashback, where the idea of a whole other life is suggested, literally
planting the seed in the sketches of a narrative that may “want” to come full
circle. This is precisely the effect it
has on Travis, suddenly asking about Jane, discovering from Anne that she
continues to send money on the 5th of every month from a bank in Houston,
Texas. When Travis picks up his son
after school in a car where the rear end has been converted to a truck, he’s a
man on a mission, with plans to find his mother in Houston, which intrigues
Hunter as well, where on the spot they both hit the road back to Texas. From the director’s perspective, the film
hits a lull until they arrive in Houston, as Sam Shepard wrote a script only up
to this point, thinking once the shoot started, they’d figure out the rest on
the fly, which simply wasn’t the case.
Shepard was involved with actress Jessica Lange, and the two of them
were on location in Iowa shooting the film COUNTRY (1984), leaving Wenders,
with the help of Hunter’s father Kit Carson, to figure out the rest. The film was actually delayed several times
when they ran out of money, which gave Wenders some wiggling room. It’s important to note that he was working
with Claire
Denis at the time as his assistant director, also Allison Anders as a UCLA
film school production assistant, both of whom had yet to shoot their first
films, also Agnès Godard as the assistant cinematographer, while at the same
time he was calling Shepard on a regular basis discussing ideas. This small circle of friends, not to mention
Robby Müller, is quite formidable, showing an unusual breadth of artistic
talent, so from the viewer’s perspective, there may be no distinguishing
difference in this interim, though it’s quite clear the powerhouse ending,
which is in effect a one-act play, was written by Sam Shepard, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning playwright.
Much like Alice
in the Cities (Alice in den Städten) Road Trilogy Pt. 1 (1974) a decade earlier, both films deal with
a single mother leaving their child with someone else, which is a story in
itself rarely depicted in American films.
In KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979), an Academy Award winning picture that
depicted the ugly impact of a contentious custody battle in a divorce, the
country was in an uproar when Meryl Streep, the mother, leaves their son with
Dustin Hoffman, the child’s father. In
this film, Jane left Hunter with his uncle’s family, with no background
information provided whatsoever in the story until the very end, while in ALICE
the child is left with a total stranger.
It’s intriguing to consider the effects in each instance from differing
cultures, where the idea of viewing Wenders from a feminist perspective imposes
values that aren’t inherent in the film, with the same being said from a
religious perspective. Wenders’s films
largely take place in an existential void somewhere on the road, far away from
any family or home, where characters are lonely and adrift, much like Wenders
himself on his American odyssey, where he’s caught in a no man’s land somewhere
between Europe and the United States.
What’s uniquely different about this film is how the mysterious wanderer
Travis tries to restore his family by aligning himself with the innocence of a
7-year old child, regaining his confidence and perspective through this union,
which is a severe psychological shift from the opening. Only with this restored balance can Travis
play the final card, which he does by discovering Jane working in a strange,
subterranean peep-show that has sexual overtones, but nothing explicit is ever
shown, only suggested. Instead it’s a
twisted fantasy playland for lonely men who wish to tell their troubles to
pretty young girls while they basically listen through a one-way mirror where
the men can see the girls but the girls can’t see the men, where it’s all talk,
no touching, though John Lurie plays an owner or pimp that suggests other business
arrangements can be made. Whether these
places actually exist somewhere is open to question, but it works perfectly for
what Shepard has in mind, very similar to Robert Altman’s adaptation of his
play Fool
for Love (1985), featuring long, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies of damaged
and tortured souls. Both are among the
most dramatically intense films made by either director, culminating with brilliantly
written, spectacularly conceived scenes, where Nastassja Kinski, listening to a
long-winded monologue from Harry Dean Stanton, gives the performance of her
career, where the camera literally fixates on her as she slowly begins to
realize who’s on the other side of the mirror.
These scenes are so acutely sad and theatrically powerful that it takes
awhile for the viewer to recover afterwards, as Travis, once again escaping
from the reconstructed family he doesn’t think he deserves, disappears into the
existential murk of another surreal neon-lit landscape.
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