Romanticized alienation, intense colors, and deserted landscapes in Wim Wenders' cult road movie, which won the Grand Prix at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.
A man wearing a dusty red cap, a faded suit, and a tie eats a handful of ice in a godforsaken bar in the middle of the desert and passes out. His name is Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and he has a son named Hunter. Four years ago, Travis and his wife disappeared from their child’s life and left Hunter with his uncle, who has now come to pick up Travis from the desert. Now the father and son travel to Houston to find the boy’s mother, Jane.
The film follows the dramatic breakup of a family against the backdrop of the American landscape—a desert in the Southwest, the San Fernando Valley in California, the high rises and neon signs of Houston. This landscape is bisected by roads, where most of the film’s action unfolds. Wim Wenders is obsessed with roads: the street was the first thing he shot on his 8 mm camera as a twelve-year-old boy; he named his first production company Road Movies; most of his films feature protagonists on the road and are about movement.
But the path in Wenders' films does not always lead to the goal: Travis finds Jane, but their meeting does not lead to a family reunion. The conversation between the former lovers on the phone through the glass partition of the peep show where Jane works is one of the most memorable breakup scenes in movie history. The movement that shaped Wenders’ style, New German Cinema, proclaimed a break from the past, and Paris, Texas is a late, moving, almost sentimental manifestation of that break.
The film will be screened in English and German with Russian subtitles.
Paris, Texas
Director: Wim Wenders
Germany, France, Great Britain, USA, 1984. 139 min. 16+