Wim Wenders
Paris, Texas

Film (remarkably) missing in the debaserian database. I will try to patch it up, even if, perhaps, many who liked the film will not agree with this review which neither fails nor fully praises a film as fascinating as it is, in my opinion, in the long run overrated.

I am not, it should be said, an outright fan of Wenders, and I find his German period, the first one, the most successful (the one of "Alice in the Cities", 1973, to be clear) and I also find his documentaries very successful ("Buena Vista Social Club", 1998; "Pina", 2011) but the Wenders of the '80s and, worse, the early '90s leaves me puzzled, including (pure heresy) the acclaimed "Wings of Desire" (1987) which, however, seems to me more focused than this "Paris, Texas".

Indeed, the American period. Wenders, like all Europeans, is fascinated by the eternal spaces of the United States which contrast with the more limited ones of the Old Continent, just as he is fascinated by the idea of being able to tell a completely American story, a story that could never be European. And that the great American spaces tempt him almost unconsciously is made clear from the first sequence, with the protagonist (Harry Dean Stanton) lost wandering in the desert on the border with Mexico. And everything is immediately very strange, because until then Wenders was more interested in men than in the surrounding environment, but I believe this is the film's greatest virtue. Wenders, as a European on a "trip" to the United States, notices landscapes and architectures that a local wouldn't even notice (some beautiful shots of the sprawling highways of Los Angeles; the papier-mâché dinosaurs standing out against completely western towns) and knows how to tell, through images, something that lies between the fascination of the American myth and its inevitable decay.

So, there's a man who, indeed, is lost in the desert. His brother finds him and brings him home. It turns out that the man has a son and is wandering America in search of his ex-girlfriend (who is also the child's mother), whom he is still in love with (or maybe not, maybe he just wants to see her again). The age difference between the two is significant, and the love was perhaps more passionate than reasoned. Whatever it is, he finds her in a peep-show, returns the child to her, and disappears once again.

In short, this is the plot, which is the weak point of the film. Because if the first half is remarkable, with the protagonist in total silence and the resurfacing of memories, when our protagonist takes the child with him to search for the mother (essentially the entire second half) the film begins to suffer from a stasis that is not very Wenders-like and hardly understandable. The apex of such stasis is reached in what should be the film's climactic scene, the meeting between the two exes in the peep-show (with him able to see her, but she unable to see him, and understanding, from the man's stories, who is on the other side of the glass): the sequence lasts 20 minutes, and apart from some initial suspense, the rest is 15 minutes of chatter and boredom that neither excites nor moves. Just like the ending, open and somewhat predictable (the protagonist is one of the least reliable figures ever to appear in a film), it leaves a bitter taste, especially given the considerable length of the work: two and a half hours. It's as if Wenders (and the screenwriter L. M. Kit Carson, from a story by Sam Shepard) focused on the touching father-son relationship (truly excellent) and spent less time building the one between the two exes, which appears superficial and predictable, despite the skill of the two actors and the (indeed chilling) entrance of Nastassja Kinski.

"[...] Alice in the Cities in the boundless expanses of the United States, Kramer vs. Kramer in an intellectual version" (Paolo Mereghetti)

Indeed, at times it seems to recall Benton's film in a less popular and more pretentious way. We must also remember that telling America with typically European eyes is not easy, even Antonioni got it wrong with the complex "Zabriskie Point" (1970), and this is, after all, one of the stages of Wenders' American cinema, which already had precedents with "Hammett" (1982), as if the early '80s represented a kind of severing of the umbilical cord from his homeland for the German director (strangely at a time when German cinema was proposing films of worldwide relevance, consider the monumental "Heimat", 1984).

It became, all too quickly, a cult obtaining the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (Dirk Bogarde president of the Jury) at a Festival that, it must be said, did not propose particularly successful works and, perhaps, "Paris, Texas" indeed had something more among them all. Ry Cooder's soundtrack is significant, it can do a lot, not everything.