Paris, Texas never actually visits the town it is named after
A silent man stumbles out of the West Texas desert after four years missing and slowly tries to rebuild his family. Wim Wenders made Paris, Texas in about a month with an unfinished script, and it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1984. The Paris of the title appears only in a photograph.
Wenders, a West German director who said he wanted to tell a story about America, co-wrote the film with the playwright Sam Shepard. Their first idea, loosely based on Shepard's Motel Chronicles, concerned two brothers, one without his memory, and the script swelled to 160 pages before the brothers' bond shrank in importance. Harry Dean Stanton, until then mostly a character actor, plays Travis Henderson, and called it the role he had always wanted. Dean Stockwell, cast as his brother Walt, had been ready to give up acting for real estate. Hunter Carson, who plays Travis's son, was the son of co-writer L. M. Kit Carson and the actress Karen Black, who helped him learn his lines.
Travis's only possession of note is a snapshot of an empty lot in Paris, Texas, where he believes he was conceived and hoped to build a home. Walt drives him back to Los Angeles, where he and his wife have been raising the boy. Father and son then set off for Houston to track down Travis's estranged wife, Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, and find her working in a peep show. In the film's famous climax he talks to her through a one-way mirror, his back turned, recounting their marriage as if it were someone else's story, before leaving mother and son together.
Filming, mostly around Fort Stockton and Marathon in the Trans-Pecos, ran in story order without storyboards, a first for Wenders. When Shepard moved to another job he sent notes on the ending, and later dictated Travis's monologue by phone to a secretary on set. Claire Denis was assistant director, and money ran short before the end. Kinski, who could see only a mirror in her scenes, said it gave her a real sense of isolation, and she kept a diary to invent Jane's past.
Besides the Palme d'Or, the film took the FIPRESCI and Ecumenical Jury prizes at Cannes. Critics have compared it to John Ford's The Searchers and read it as a Western as well as a road movie. It placed 185th in Sight and Sound's 2022 poll. Wenders joked that Travis's exit let all his earlier male heroes retire to a home on the edge of Paris, Texas.
Source: Paris, Texas (film)
