252. Paris, Texas

Song - The Long And Winding Road (The Beatles)

Movie: Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984)

Wim Wenders' newest movie Perfect Days follows the daily routines of Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a Tokyo public toiler cleaner. He takes great pride in the seemingly thankless job, and finds plenty of joy outside of it, devoting time to take pictures of the city's trees, read Faulkner and Higshmith and sing along to his cassette tapes of Patti Smith and Lou Reed. We learn little of his life beyond that, though we get a brief glimpse of his estranged relationship with his sister, a woman who wears expensive suits and has her own driver. She is definitely not devoting parts of her days to soak in The Velvet Underground, but does have a daughter called Niko. It's a wonderful detail, especially after seeing Paris, Texas, which is in part about how the same childhood influences can move two siblings in two completely different directions. The film spends plenty of time on highly romanticised American highways and their roadside restaurants and motels, getting to Terlingua, Houston, the Mojave desert and Los Angeles. It never reaches Paris, Texas, but the idea of it drives everything forward. 

Travis (Harry Dean Stanton) and Walt (Dean Stockwell)'s father met their mother in Paris, Texas. When introducing her, he liked to note that she came from Paris, without adding more details, presenting her as a 'fancy woman'. However, she was just 'plain' and found it deeply unpleasant having to pretend, even for a bit, to be something she was not, making her relationship with her husband much more difficult. It's fairly obvious why Travis tells this story to his son. He is just back from three years of mysterious solitude in the desert, trying to make sense of his life and his destructed marriage with Jane (Nastassja Kinski), who he idealised so much he lost track of reality. Following Travis' dissapearance Walt took his son in and raised him as his own. Walt is a well-adjusted man, but he is married to an actual French woman and works as a designer of highway billboards, selling fancier lives to drivers between Texas and California.

The film itself might as well be a billboard for the American Southwest. Wenders and the Dutch cinematogropher Robby Muller film everything with highly expressive, somtimes unnatural colors and lighting, giving a special air of cool, slightly melancholic distinctiveness to every location. Near the end there is a (famous) shot of Stanton standing in front of a hotel in Houston. He is enveloped by green streetlight, contrasted by the sunset in the background causing the sky to transition between blue and red. The hotel itself is mostly in the dark, with only a couple of lit rooms. The Italian neorealists would probably balk at this shot, but it's no science fiction either. This always remains a real place and even if it is never again captured as beautifully as it is here, you get the sense that it could be, under certain circumstances, or if you know how to look at it. This is true for many of the scenes and I like that you can look at this approach from different angles. Are Muller and Wenders naive Europeans who have fallen under the same spell as Walt and Travis, looking for fanciness where there is none? Or are they counteracting their father, showing you don't to need to look for Europe, or escape in romantic fantasy to find beauty in the plainness of daily life? The latter is very obviously the point of Perfect Days, and that lack of ambiguity is one of the reasons why that film, despite its pleasures, can't hold a candle to Paris, Texas. 

Another reason is Paris, Texas' conclusion, which has rightly earned its place in film history. Finding out that Jane works at a peep show, Travis becomes her client 'confessing' their story to her. You could probably develop a whole film class on shot composition just from the various ways in which Wenders frames the two people on either side of the glass, but his most effective shot is a simple close up of Kinski, as she listens to Stanton telling his story and slowly starts to understand who her client really is. Wenders holds the shot for a long time, almost literally putting us in her shoes, evoking how it is both exhilirating and upsetting to hear a long forgotten voice without seeing the face behind it. From Travis' monologue (and Jane's subsequent response) we get a good idea of why their marriage never had a chance. Neither Jane nor Travis knew how to handle their big love for each other, and even less so the difficulties they faced as a result of that, leading to jealousy, irrationality and eventually abuse, mostly from Travis' side. The film doesn't condemn either of them for what happened, but it forces you to consider your emotional reaction to all of it. You can end the film having sympathy for Travis, or disdain, or something in between, but your response will depend on how you feel about certain specific things that you need to take into consideration and that will always complicate your thoughts. The major flaw of Perfect Days is that it consciously avoids this, letting the audience completely off the hook. The film vaguely hints of a tragedy/misfortune in Hirayama's life, but he remains a blank slate on whom you can project your own feelings and emotions and always feel good about it.