Hyde Park Picture House
November 6 & 8
Composed at the height of the director’s creative powers, Paris, Texas (1984) – Wim Wenders reconfigured cinematic love poem to American genre filmmaking and a seminal art-house movie of the 1980s – makes a timely appearance at this year’s 2012 Leeds International Film Festival.
A revisionist tale of modern America filtered through a deeply-rooted European-Art sensibility frames every ravishing sequence in this highly original Cannes 1984 Palme D’Or winner. As one of German New Wave cinema’s leading practitioners and an ardent cinéphile with a love of John Ford, Paris, Texas reinforces Wender’s European rapport with alienated withdrawn protagonists, long takes and wide empty vistas, fused with elements of his love affair with archetypal Americana from award–winning playwright Sam Shepard’s concise poetic script to Ry Cooder’s raw, bluesy, hauntingly evocative soundtrack.
Part existential road movie, part modern psychological (Western-themed) drama, this enduring film charts the emotional journey of a separated father (and son) who attempts to piece together the debris of a broken relationship. The movie opens with a mysterious apparently-mute drifter called Travis (cult actor Harry Dean Stanton in an unforgettable understated performance in the lead role) wandering through the desolate American South-western desert with temporary amnesia and a self-imposed 4 year absence from society and for reasons he can no longer remember. When found, Travis is rehabilitated back to health by his brother Walt (Dean Stockwell), and attempts to regain his memory back of the life he led before he disappeared (beautifully exemplified in a scene with some old Super-8mm holiday footage). In trying to atone for past sins and severed familial bonds, Travis tries to reconnect with his forgotten past by reuniting with his 7 year-old son Hunter (Hunter Carson), now living with his brother Walt and French sister in-law in suburban Los Angeles, and ultimately sets out to find his estranged wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski).
From this simple story, Wenders conjures a powerful treatise on the myth of the American suburban family whilst invoking a meditation on the absence of communication. The film’s probing exploration of Travis’ behaviour infused with Robby Müller’s (Kings of the Road, 1976; Dancer in the Dark, 2000) outstanding cinematography: a stark widescreen canvas of the vast American landscape (with bright blue skies, sun-bleached deserts and gold-red sunsets) coupled with vibrant neon-saturated cityscapes of bars, motels and houses, bestows a refreshing authenticity and refined understatement to this film (something that wasn’t overtly prevalent in the frenetically edited pop culture film style of the post-MTV 1980s). This is consolidated by a revelatory surreal final encounter between husband and wife, rendered superbly in one of the most memorable extended monologues in movie history and unravelling very movingly the film’s central mystery and the history of the character’s relationships.
Paris, Texas may be a slow burner – its lingering pace and long running time (a posterior-numbing 147 mins!) may not be for everyone but in essence it’s a beautifully observed European vision of a semi-fictional America, a profoundly poignant character study of loneliness, family love, loss and redemption: cinematic alchemy for those hardened souls with a modicum of patience in the darkness of the movie theatre.
Norman Che Chan