Paris, Texas

Sometimes something happens with a person in your life that is absolutely devastating, your world is completely flattened and you're left adrift, wandering spiritually and unable to relate to anyone else. The desolation of the scenery in this film, the poor run-down towns in Texas, and the wide openness of the landscape as the little car drives through it mirrors this feeling of being lost after such an event. This is a film that wields a heavy emotional hammer, and it left me with a hollow feeling in my chest.

The pace is slow but it matches the weight of this guy's past, and builds to an extraordinary scene, as he and his old lover communicate with the benefit of time having passed and through a mirror, saying the words which usually end up being unsaid, and coming to a kind of peace. There are scars which never completely heal but somehow we move on, and this film is a catharsis. There are so many other things to love about it too - Wim Wender's use of light and color, Ry Cooder's lonesome slide guitar, and Harry Dean Stanton's sense of what it is to be broken. It's a masterful, haunting work, one that will stick with you.

Moody, slow, absorbing, you lose yourself in this 'love lost' and in many ways tragic story. This film was probably an early warning to us all of how life can easily overwhelm without us realising it. It is also virtually unique in the successful portrayal of a man who is deeply lost in his innermost thoughts that the outside world becomes almost a minutiae. Mr Stanton encapsulates this mood perfectly and this is probably his best performance ever. The most moving scene (and there are many) might be when he reviews some old cine film of his life (a normal happy love story which surely could not have gone wrong so badly)before he walked away from it all. I can't help but think this is a real life epistle which could be a marker for how life has overtaken the human race in the last 20 years.

Paris Texas is a slow, moody, and delicate study about a man who once ran away from everything and now is coming to terms with himself and learning to forgive himself, by finally facing he people he turned his back on. The Wim Wenders directed movie still today rests in a fairly under recognized status, which doesn't stretch the term "cult classic" when applied to it. Paris, Texas is about redemption, the road, family, and the bleakness of the American Southwest. It contains one of the most memorable and unusual openings ever. We hear Ry Cooder's lonely single note twangy guitar on the soundtrack with cinematographer Robby Müller (Barfly, To Live and Die in L.A. , Dead Man) capturing the majestic vistas, rock formations, and the open desert in his camera. Actor Harry Dean Stanton walks out of the dry and desolate landscape, wearing a wornout black sports jacket and dusty red baseball cap. It's a beautifully staged opening sequence. A perfect start to a perfect movie. This man is lost and in need of being found. It's his brother played by actor Dean Stockwell ("Quantum Leap", Blue Velvet) who gets word of Stanton's whereabouts and goes after him, which begins the journey of redemption. Nastassja Kinski plays Stanton's young x-wife and the true love of his life. Kinski, the daughter of legendary German actor Klaus Kinski, doesn't make her entrance into the film until the later reels, but her lingering presence is felt throughout. It's almost the same type of thing that Coppola did by not having Brando appear in Apocalypse Now until the conclusion. The scenes that Kinski does have in the end with Stanton are some of the best moments ever captured on film. They're highly emotional and will cause even the most hard-hearted to shed a tear. Both Stanton and Kinski are very subtle and understated in their acting. It's true to their characters. Eight year old Hunter Carson plays Stanton's biological son, who was raised by his uncle (Stockwell). Carson certainly deserves mention in any conversation about great child performances on film. Paris, Texas is a masterpiece. There's no way around it. It's a movie that slowly reveals itself putting the audience right in the shoes of Stanton, who also is trying to remember his past and face it. The story was penned by playwright and actor Sam Shepard, though he doesn't appear in the film. Shepard, a very good playwright, has outdone himself with Paris, Texas surpassing his perhaps more well known, True West. Paris, Texas is a film that must not only be seen, but experienced. Sure the pacing is extremely slow, but as an audience member, use that to your advantage to suck in the picturesque orange southwest desert against the deep blue skys, and the poignant acting, and haunting soundtrack. There's no reason not to treat yourself to this uniquely American masterpiece meditation. It would make a great nightcap for a triple feature with two other simular themed American films, The Searchers and Taxi Driver.

I first saw this film almost fifteen years ago and thought about almost nothing else for at least a month. I have never seen a film before or since that presents the extremes of love, pain, and loss with such immediacy and ruthless candor. Watching this film with openness, identifying with the characters, made me wince and writhe in sympathetic agony. I didn't cry; rather, I was reminded of all the times I have wept in my life, and why.

Perhaps each person person has a film -- usually a masterpiece -- which affects him or her so strongly that it is beyond description. This is mine.

At face value, the screen story, about a dysfunctional family, is weak. The plot is not really credible. The lead character (Travis) is an older man who in the first ten minutes of the film wonders alone in the desert like a horse with no name, seemingly suffering from severe trauma. But Travis' later behavior and the behavior of other characters in the film are not believable, given this opening gambit.

However, if we discard our need to interpret behavior rationally, then the film works, either as a dream or, more generically, as a parable of modern day America, from the viewpoint of a European film director. The characters and their journey through the film's story are symbolic of American culture as a whole, with its ever-present loneliness, urban alienation, emotional separation, and general rootlessness.

The film's visuals and music combine to prop up the thin story, and give the film its enduring cultural theme. Cinematographer Robby Muller's images are stunning. His location shots both in the desert and in the urban jungle, using polarizing filters, are works of true photographic art. The images, with their florescent greens, reds, blues, and yellows in dim light are just terrific. More than any dialogue could, these visuals effectively convey the loneliness, alienation, and lost love that are so characteristically American. And Ry Cooder's simple but haunting Tex-Mex guitar sounds amplify this grim mood.

The film's main flaw is its length. With a runtime of 150 minutes, some parts of the film could have been edited out, without loss of the film's message.

"Paris, Texas" is a memorable art house film about the modern American experience. Like other art house films, the story is not necessarily to be taken literally. Instead, the story provides narrative support for the visuals, the music, and other film elements, the combination of which imparts some broader or deeper social message than could be conveyed by story alone.