Movie Review - Paris, Texas (1984)
SUMMARY: A man who walks out on his family shows up 4 years later walking the Texas badlands in a daze. He slowly regains his hold on reality and memories and reclaims his past by taking his estranged 7 year old son back to his wife. But tracking down his missing wife in Houston also leads to the surprise of a lifetime.
PARIS, TEXAS (1984) is a German-French-American co-production directed by German director Win Wenders. The screenplay by the great character actor Sam Shepard (Black Hawk Down, Steel Magnolias, The Notebook) treats a sensitive subject with a lot of dignity without, however, any overt exposition.
This is a story about losing things that are most precious to us in life. It’s about losing and then somehow reclaiming them after going through the purgatory.
The most interesting character in this gorgeous-looking movie is of course Travis, a mysterious man with amnesia walking the badlands of Texas all alone, played by Harry Dean Stanton. The casting is perfect. Stanton does not even look like he is acting.
Travis, found wondering like a ghost on the burning bone-dry plains of Texas with many months’ worth of beard on his face and a tattered business suit on his back, is driven home to L.A. by his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell).
Walt is a billboard manufacturer who lives with his wife Anne (Aurore Clement) and 7 year old son Hunter (Hunter Carson). Hunter actually turns out to be the son that Travis has abandoned when he mysteriously disappeared from the face of the earth 4 years ago.
Now Travis’s reappearance creates a problem for everybody in Walt’s household. Hunter is reluctant to accept Travis as his father since he is already calling Walt “daddy.”
Travis slowly warms up to his new home and starts to remember, with Walt’s help, the details of a life that crashed four years earlier.
Through the familiar plot-device of an old scratchy home movie, we get to realize that once upon a time Travis was married to a beautiful blonde much younger than himself, Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski - the daughter of the great German character actor Klaus Kinski who probably played an important percentage of the bad guy roles in the European cinema during the 60s and 70s.
Travis and Hunter drive an old beaten up truck down to Houston where Travis tracks down Jane to a strip joint. This no-contact “safe sex” peep house allows patrons to watch girls do whatever they want them to do through a one-way mirror and communicating through a telephone line and speaker.
In one of the most poignant sequences of the film, Travis acting as a normal customer, starts to narrate the story of their broken lives to Jane who starts to listen not having the slightest clue what’s in store for her.
As Travis’s story progresses she of course realizes that this strange man is actually providing an account of her own life and, yes, the sound of his voice is also very familiar. Soon the jig is up and she confronts her old husband through the one-way mirror.
In this crucial sequence we are let to understand the core events that lie at the heart of this 2.5 hour movie. It turns out Travis and Jane started out as a couple so happy together and crazy about one another that Travis even quit working in order to spend as much time as possible with her. But soon he got jealous, just like his own dad got jealous of his mother for no good reason at all. And after Jane gave birth to Hunter she became very upset and unhappy with the relationship.
After a point, Travis left the house on foot to Mexico and have refused to speak a word to anyone for the next 4 years. Hunter ended up being adopted by Walt and Jane bounced off here and there until settling in that peep-show parlor.
The movie ends with Jane agreeing to go find Hunter who is waiting for her at a downtown hotel. We are relieved with the closure provided by the mother and son getting together. But Travis takes off towards a different future because he realizes too many things have been broken beyond repair between her and Jane to put it together again that easily.
In addition to the heart-wrenching story of a relationship blown to pieces and then partially glued back together, this movie has two additional gifts for the viewer.
The first is the stark beauty of Texas which is captured by the amazing cinematography of Robby Muller (who used the camera himself from start to finish). This film is such a pleasure to watch that one can frame every scene and hang it on the living room wall.
The second gift is the eerie twanging original soundtrack provided by the incomparable Ry Cooder. Without his music, “Paris, Texas” would be nowhere near where it stands today, 22 years after it won a dozen movie awards, especially in Europe.
This heart breaker of a beautiful flick deserves a 9 out of 10.
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