Review of Paris, Texas (1984) by Orpheus A — 14 Apr 2010

Wim Wenders Paris, Texas portrays life as viewed from a strange, dream like perspective. It captures the turbulent avenues of the human heart, the halcyon nostalgia of memory as travelled through a barren, windswept landscape of days and years. The tiny eccentricities the make us human and the highways as mapped out of its mortal entirety. And at the risk of sounding patronising (patronising moi?) I would suggest the viewer has to be travelled a little in years themselves in order to truly appreciate its story, if not its superb artistry.

Harry Dean Stanton plays Travis, a man who for four years has been wandering aimlessly the ghostly Mohave landscape. His brother Walt (Dean Stockwell)finds him out there, having thought him dead, and together they travel back to California where Travis meets his young son whom Walt and his wife have reared themselves. The dialogue is sprinkled with strangely beautiful quirks for instance when Paul explains to his brother that he works for a company that makes highway billboards Travis says" Oh, so you are the one who makes them, some of those are really beautiful" as though his brother were the only one who constructed them. The cinematography and direction is transcendental;all played out to a spectral slide guitar soundtrack. from the haunting super eight films that visage the days of young love. To the landscape of ghostly roads, neon lit petrol stations, skeletal railway lines and midnight cafes. To the final heartbreaking third where the conversations between Stanton and an exquisite Natasha Kinski concludes in an act of selfless love sublime...

The human heart deserves more than mere escapist entertainment, the detritus and junk food fodder than fills our cinema screens, the human heart deserves Paris, Texas.