Paris, Texas

1984
Director: Wim Wenders
Writer: Sam Shepard

A sweeping helicopter shot over a vast desert landscape of bare rock and warm bittersweet copperish hues. The camera zooms in on a lone figure, dwarfed by these huge surroundings. This is Travis, a wandering man who has spent the last four years escaping his past by trekking alone across the American south, clad in his shabby suit and distinctive red cap. Upon collapsing in a petrol station, he is soon rescued by his brother Walt, who had long since believed him to be dead after his disappearance from home.

But Travis is a changed man- unable or unwilling to speak, dead eyed and walking aimlessly off, seemingly oblivious to all around him. Walt is often at his wits’ end trying to deal with as they drive their way torturously from Texas to his home in Los Angeles. Travis gradually begins to speak, but minimally. Not sleeping and barely eating, he refuses to say what has happened to him all these years; his face still tinged with sadness from a period of grief in his past that still taints him but which he struggles to remember. There is an emptiness in his life- we see him sat alone in a hotel room staring unblinkingly at static on a television screen.

It’s upon returning to Walt’s family, caring wife Anne and son Hunter, that something awakens in Travis. Hunter, it emerges, is Travis’s own son, raised by Walt and Anne as their own child after the mysterious and sudden disappearances of both Travis and his wife Jane.  What was so serious as to cause them both to leave their own son? Travis needs this chance to rebuild his life, reconnect with his son and put to rest the demons that plague his mind and tore up his family.

Wim Wender’s film is a deceptively simple fable about the importance of family and the roots we create for ourselves in the people and places around us, and how strong or brittle these can be. From here we build our desires and dreams- a maid who helps Travis in his aim of self-improvement tells him “You must look to the sky, not to the ground”. Everybody needs to look up and out, work to get the best for themselves but not totally lose their heads in the clouds. Each of these characters is striving for their own paradise, their own American Dream if you look at it. It is about overcoming hard times and improving upon it. Paris, Texas for Travis has always been the realisation of his dreams. The town means an awful lot to him, as his parents described how it was where they first made love, and where he was probably conceived. We never actually go to Paris, instead only seeing a photo of an empty space there, a lot where Travis hopes to build a home. He is so fixated on fulfilling this dream that he loses track of the things around him, only realising when it’s too late. Travis has spent so long running away from everything, constantly moving and distracting his mind that he’s forgotten what matters, what’s best for his family. He must re-establish their roots, even if it means sacrificing anything that he had before.

It is ironic that it’s a foreigner who is so able to capture the essence of these people and places in this love letter to the American south. Sam Shepard’s effortlessly natural script and dialogue creates such an air of realism while the sprawling cityscape of L.A. and the vast expanses of Texas are filmed with such confidence and in such distinct colours that they often look like paintings dwarfing the small figures within them. The frequent recurrence of the colour red, here captured so vividly, imbues the objects with such vitality and richness as they highlight the purposes of Travis’s life and pinpoint the things that matter most amongst the bustle of existence, the markers on his journey. The red shades are so bold and filmed amongst so many other expressive colours: the warm orange hues of the Mojave Desert, the strong blue of endless skies, the eerie green glow of electric lights.

It’s easy to understand why this won the Palme d’Or. In terms of plotting it’s surprisingly simple and linear but its real strength lies in its ability to create characters so well drawn out which we can invest so much in emotionally. The dialogue is natural and unshowy. Travis connects with both Walt and Hunter with conversations ranging from childhood memories of parents to discussions about the Big Bang. The entire film is low key, preferring a love of the intimate and ramshackle over any sort of spectacle or cloying oversentimentality. This is wonderfully summarised in a scene where Travis describes his mother and how she never needed to be fancy, just good. The father’s obsession for her to be better is ultimately his undoing. Paris, Texas avoids such problems, thankfully focusing instead on the details that matter. It is a surprisingly long film and its languid and often patient pacing will not be to everyone’s tastes. But where this film succeeds is how it avoids the mawkish melodramatics of many other family dramas, instead working more as a contemporary western film. It’s a morality tale about a lone figure in a big bad world, an anti-hero of sorts who must preserve the natural order of world beyond any sort of social structures.