Paris, Texas [1983]

Paris, Texas ranks as the best film by celebrated German filmmaker Wim Wenders, and is often counted among the finest movies ever made. This is a marvelous road movie that delves into spiritual, post-modernist and psycho-analytical issues. The vast American landscape with its neon billboards, long uninterrupted highways and vast uncharted territories has been wonderfully employed to depict human alienation where communication has become a difficult parameter. Right from its lazily captivating opening sequence, where a mysterious looking man without any name or identity is seen wandering about the Texan deserts, the director keeps us enthralled. Soon we come to know that he has been missing for the last four years and has a young son who is being looked after by his thoroughly Americanized brother and his wife. But the reasons for his sudden disappearance are revealed only at the end through the now legendary one-way glass monologue. Like Alice in the Cities, another majestic road movie by Wenders, here too the complex relationship between a disenchanted adult and an exuberant child plays at the forefront of the movie. Harry Dean Stanton, as the melancholic, taciturn and deeply human protagonist Travis, is brilliant in his understated portrayal; and so is the performance of the kid who plays his young son slowly getting to connect with his father. The long, evocative camera shots and the minimalist acoustic guitar riffs play vital roles in presenting a poetic tale of loneliness, lost love and home-coming.





Director: Wim Wenders
Genre: Drama/Road Movie
Language: English
Country: Germany/US