Empire UK

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MASTERPIECE # 144

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E WAS KIND OF RAGGEDY AND WILD.

And she was very beautiful you know?” This

in its simple way is the perfect summary of

Paris Texas possibly the greatest American

film ever made by a European. But those

song-like cadences written by Sam Shepard

and softly spoken by Harry Dean Stanton’s

immortal drifter Travis are possessed of the infinite

complexities of the human heart. For this is the story of

a love story. And the distinction is vital.

The film begins watching a solitary figure wandering the

parched Texan plain in a pinstripe suit and scarlet baseball cap

a raggedy man following a railway track. Electively mute Travis

is returning from self-imposed exile. And Stanton’s haunted

geological face is carved by trauma and determination.

Wim Wenders with the best hair and biggest glasses

of all the German New Wave had been drawn to America

like a moth to the beam of a movie projector. Enamoured

of hallmarked American legends like Hawks and Ford he

desired to reframe their big-screen mythology through the

lens of his cool European intellect. The wellspring was the

Motel Chronicles Shepard’s collection of poems and “broken

stories” of hardscrabble Americana and crumpled machismo.

They possessed a powerful yearning for the road.

Paris Texas possesses the strange clarity of a dream. Then

what is America if not something dreamed up by Europeans?

Wenders alongside cinematographerRobby Müller has his fill

of the limitless landscape. But it is beauty shorn of sentiment:

railroads fences and highways extend mercilessly to the

horizon bisecting towns barely even

there in the half-light; only the fl ickers

of neon smudged in a rain-spotted

windscreen speak of life. Has there

ever been a lonelier fi lm?

In a recent interview Wenders

summed up his entire career. “There’s

a fi lm of John Ford called The Searchers

and sometimes I think that’s [my] main

topic... It’s searchers” he surmised.

“It’s people who are searching trying to

defi ne what they live for trying to fi nd

[the] meaning of their lives trying to

fi nd their role in life looking for love

searching searching searching.”

Ferried back to a dusky LA Travis is

reunited with his son Hunter (Hunter

Carson) who has been living with his

uncle (Dean Stockwell) and aunt (Aurore

Clément). From there he will set out to

fi nd Jane (Nastassja Kinski) lost wife

lost mother. He is in part Wayne’s Ethan

Edwards a man defi ned by his search

who can never truly come home.

There are other movies in its bones.

Travis the name harkens to Travis

Bickle from Taxi Driver: quintessential

outsider broken man. Also Antonioni’s

Zabriskie Point — another European lost

in American spaces. For all his infl uences

Wenders invented a new way of looking

at America. A captivating ambivalent

vision that inspired a generation of indie

fi lmmakers from Jarmusch to Van Sant

and widescreen musicians like U2.

As for Ry Cooder’s sublime

fret-skating score to Wenders it was as if the composer had

re-shot the movie only with a steel guitar not a camera.

Notes that hover in the air like memories.

The interiors are almost Lynchian mid-shots and

close-ups lacquered in hot lurid reds and sci-fi greens. The

Houston peep show where the fi lm gravitates is segregated

into box-like rooms each a mock-domestic interior as if a

perversion of family life. Divided from the client by a two-way

mirror their voices connected only by an internal phone the

girls provide sustenance and titillation. “If there’s anything...

you want to talk about” whispers Jane into the mirror.

On the other side unseen Travis begins their story. Here

through long graceful takes Wenders aspires to the condition

of theatre trading the regiment of shot design for intense

rehearsal allowing the actors’ choices to dictate how he would

shoot each day. That two weathered Americans like Stockwell

and Stanton have wooed ethereal European beauties like

Clément and Kinski only emphasises the dream logic. The

magical Kinski (supposedly life-worn but still stop-the-traffi c

stunning) was only on set for a week but the fi nal act feels like

time has been suspended. Shepard’s languid dialogue; the slow

cascade of emotion; their closeness and separation transcend

cinematic formula. Their tragic tale is recounted but never

shown. Yet it is all we can see and feel.

Stanton hungry for a good role ended up with the role of

his life. He doesn’t reveal Travis so much as deepen him. There

is something limitless about him. From tongue-tied vagabond

to a kind of redemption he remains a ghost a searcher another

of Wenders’ earthbound angels who can love but not touch.

“The greatest

American

fi lm ever

made by a

European.”

Paris Texas

1984 065NOW$&35 12

REVOLUTIONARY ROADS

803%4

IAN NATHAN

1 Harry Dean

Stanton’s Travis

at the start of

this quest.

2 The magical

Nastassja Kinski

as lost wife Jane.

3 Stanton with screen

son Hunter Carson.