Wim Wenders (Germany, born 1945)

Paris, Texas (1984)

I had to watch Paris, Texas twice.

Before either viewing, in December 2018, when I was 33, I went to the Vaudeville Theatre in London to see a production of True West starring Kit Harington and Jonny Flynn. I had no special reason for going- I simply wanted something to do when I was on a short holiday, and I looked forward to the novelty of seeing Jon Snow from Game of Thrones in real life.

I liked the play a lot. It was compelling, despite the fact that for the vast majority of its runtime it featured only two characters. There was something particularly strong and propulsive about the writing, even with almost no plot to speak of. Curious as to who the playwright was, I searched online to find it was Sam Shepard, on whom I had no prior knowledge. In doing so, I also saw that he was recently deceased, then later, when I watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, I found that he had a small acting role in it.

When I then went on to watch Paris, Texas, I made a small mental note that he was the screenwriter. I liked the film a lot, but found myself unable to write a review. I just didn’t have the words- not because it had ‘left me speechless’ (although, in a sense, it absolutely had) but more because it was a supple viewing experience which I was finding difficult to pin down, analyse or define. There was something lying in the film’s undertones, almost like a mysticism, which made its portrait of relatively normal people doing relatively normal things feel like a grand, colossal statement about all of us, and about the universe and everything in it. The movie also aches with melancholy and regret despite the fact that two of the main characters- Dean Stockwell’s Walt and Aurore Clément’s Anne- are happily married and live in a perfectly amiable state of peace and contentment (with plenty of sunshine to boot). Another central character, Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis, certainly has a strong pensive streak to his personality, and likes to look back into the past, but he doesn’t generally speak in any overly melancholic register either. For the most part, the movie’s sadness and longing hangs in the background implicitly. There is also a tension within the film, I feel, between what’s ‘ordinary’ or ‘standard’ and what isn’t- on the one hand, I’ve just described it as ‘a portrait of relatively normal people doing relatively normal things’, yet the film also features two parents who inexplicably abandon their child, the father disappearing alone into the desert for four years, and it’s unusually warm and empathetic to both of them. I guess Paris, Texas also represents a point at which European art cinema meets sun-scorched Americana, with a completely different approach and feel to when Sergio Leone arguably did such a thing 20 years earlier.

The supposed lure of the desert was something that was recognisable from True West, and was probably the most prominent thematic link between the two pieces. In that play, one of its characters also somewhat traverses the desert- though not, I deduce, with the same level of vagrancy with which Travis has done it. Later in that play, the character’s brother desperately wants to go back out to the desert with him, with no stated aim, and presumably just to immerse himself in the landscape, feeling its power. It begs the question as to whether these desires are to be taken at face value or represent a more broad-reaching and somewhat allegorical ‘call of the wild’ that, to varying extents, we all feel from time to time, identifying a point at which our sensible, rational minds momentarily crave something ancient and sweeping and untamed, with none of the clutter and artifice that we have to tolerate in our daily lives. This movie is perhaps- amongst many other things- about what might happen if someone actually followed through on that crazy impulse, all their modern responsibilities and duties simply cast into the wind.

Paris, Texas takes its time. It is not a film that is in any hurry at all. It is also a piece which simultaneously feels dramatically honest and authentic (if perhaps sometimes very slightly contrived), but also elusive and withholding. We don’t find out what Travis was doing for those four years- I suppose we are to understand that it doesn’t matter, again suggesting that this is something of a stylistic device to draw thought and contemplation from the viewer rather than reflecting any solid possibility that it is something you or anyone you know would ever come close to doing in real life.

As stated previously, I have had to watch the movie a second time to finally tease out this review, around two years after the first occasion, prompted by a viewing of Alice in the Cities, which I didn’t feel I could cover until I had belatedly tackled this one. I didn’t find Paris, Texas quite as striking second time around, but that’s not a problem- the picture’s idiosyncratic notes and striking emphasis on understanding and decency is bound to make more of an impression when you are seeing it with completely fresh eyes and no specific expectations. Overall, it is a rich, rewarding viewing experience, intrinsically thoughtful, considered, understated and humming with a quietly intense, profoundly self-possessed artistic spirit. Recommended.

Alice in the Cities (1974)

Alice in the Cities ostensibly tells a simple, straightforward story, and does so in a fairly basic way, free from unnecessary adornment. In grainy black and white, its everyman, here a frustrated artist, photographer and writer called Philip, is left with a stranger’s child at an airport and is tasked with travelling hundreds of miles in an effort to find her grandmother’s house and offload her.

It’s the kind of highly unlikely but nonetheless feasible set-up that Paris, Texas traded in, tinged with the same strange theme of sympathetically-depicted parental neglect. From here, some sort of caper may have ensued, in the vein of Three Men and a Baby. Instead, the movie is perhaps as notable for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. The child, for example, is neither a badly-behaved brat whose comedic antics eventually end up with them ‘coming around’ to their guardian and learning some vital lesson, nor is she an angelic cutesy ball of innocence whose wonderment makes the grouchy Philip see the world through a child’s eyes. She’s just a normal kid, and this quiet, thoughtful film is all the better for it.

For the most part, the movie chugs along steadily like one of the trains that Alice and Philip travel on. A noticeably lighter piece than Paris, Texas, there doesn’t seem to be any deeper meaning to its content other than what you see on screen; subsequently, I don’t feel that there is a great amount to say about the movie, other than it is a perfectly fine and acceptable way to spend 110 minutes. Perhaps in its depiction of an unlikely pairing who sometimes have sulky disagreements but always get over them, there are hints of a later film like Lost in Translation. In that film though, the central characters spend time together completely by choice, and they are both adults, meaning they are able to have in-depth discussions about life issues that would be impossible to have under these circumstances. Subsequently, this movie does not have a dialogue-rich underpinning to offset its lack of plot. It’s just a fable, with the stillness, composure and delicacy of a haiku.