Middle of nowhere: Paris, Texas on DVD

There is the man in the desert. Brown suit and tie, red cap, bearded, shrouded in dust like some forsaken antique no one’s touched. Four years ago he tried to disappear, a difficult thing to do, even in country as vast as this. He got as far as shaking off his voice. When Travis Henderson’s found passed out on the floor of some Texas tavern in the middle of nowhere they call his brother Walt, a maker of billboards in Los Angeles. Walt comes for Travis, to reintroduce him to the world. Travis could be mentally ill, autistic, or on the lam. But he’s the hero of Paris, Texas (1984), a sort of interrogation of American life and landscape, directed by a German, photographed by a Dutchman, financed with European money, written and scored by Americans, performed by an international cast—the arresting hybrid of cultural sensibilities is right there in the title—that’s still one of the most mysterious and moving pictures I know. It’s now available in a beautifully put-together two-disc set from the Criterion Collection.

The first half of Paris, Texas has Walt driving Travis back to California, where he and his wife live with Travis’ seven-year-old son Hunter. Along the way Travis recovers his speech, though he does not reveal where he’s been or why he left. The second half finds Travis reunited with Hunter and driving the two of them back to Texas, where Travis believes he can find his wife Jane, who, like Travis, vanished four years back, leaving Hunter in Walt’s care. Their reunion takes place in a strange sort of peep show, on either side of the one-way glass—Travis can see her, but she can’t see him. Travis speaks into a telephone, while Jane communicates through a speaker on the other side. They tell each other stories that may or may not be precise retellings of their troubled love and its collapse. So over the course of this movie Travis goes from being no voice to nothing but voice, a disembodied phantom from Jane’s past who has come back to restore something. What, exactly, is a little ambiguous, and more than a little heartbreaking. Questions linger. What makes a man give up his life, his voice, to go somewhere “without language or streets”? What makes him abandon his own child? But by the time we’ve reached the end of Travis and Jane’s stories the emotional specificity overwhelms the spare facts and unexplained actions.

The weight of Travis and Jane and Hunter’s story is alleviated by the lightness of Wim Wenders’ direction, his lack of judgment, his dogged attention to actorly nuance, his deep affection for American horizons, truck stops, and music. The score is by Ry Cooder, a bottleneck improvisation based around Blind Willie Johnson’s old blues ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,’ veering between wind-carved desolation and Mexican-tinged nostalgia. The movie, as much about walking as it is about driving, was shot by Robby Müller in such a way that emphasizes the expanse of the settings, splitting focus between faces and backgrounds and weather. The script, as such, comes from great playwright and handsome actor Sam Shepard, and if Criterion’s package focuses heavily on Wenders’ dominant authorship, I’d argue we should consider this just as equally to be a Sam Shepard movie, so in keeping with his themes and voice that even the bits not actually conceived by Shepard—the peep show device came from Kit Carson, who filled in as scripter while Shepard was knee-deep in Country (84)—feel ripped directly from the imaginative world of his writing, one of lonesome places and bad genes, ghostly fathers and opposite brothers. In any event, Paris, Texas is easily among the greatest achievements of everyone involved, including the actors.

Wenders wanted Shepard to play Travis, but this is impossible to imagine once you’ve spent two minutes with Harry Dean Stanton, in what sadly remains his sole credit as a leading man. He was pushing 60 then, while Nastassja Kinski, who plays Jane, was only in her mid-20s, if radiating preternatural maturity onscreen, having already worked with—and in some cases been romanced by—Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader. Kinski’s depth of character, the suspicion and longing in her gaze, and the gentleness and frustration mixed into Stanton’s voice, gestures, and face—itself a sort of road map—doesn’t leave you preoccupied with how Jane could love this man. Their long climactic scene together more than assures us that a thick and thorny story lay behind their union. Hunter Carson as their son feels playful and alert, yet never falsely ingratiating in his scenes with Stanton, while Dean Stockwell gives a warm performance as Walt, patient and anxious and mystified by this guy who happens to be his kin. To think that when Wenders cast Stockwell he was ready to give up movies for a career in real estate, a footnote in the movie’s history that nicely echoes one of its key moments, when Travis shows Walt a dog-eared photo of some land he bought in Paris, Texas. It’s just an empty lot, but it only makes sense that Travis would want to invest in a place where there’s nothing.

Criterion’s supplements are superb, including an audio commentary from the very articulate Wenders, as well as a fascinating interview he did for German television back in 2001. A major highlight is the 43-minute documentary Motion and Emotion: The Rood to Paris, Texas, gorgeously and inventively edited using a blend of talking heads and clips from Wenders’ already prolific body of work, and featuring commentary from Wenders, Cooder, Müller, Dennis Hopper, Patricia Highsmith, and even Sam Fuller, chomping cigars, of course, and offering memorable assessments of Wenders such as, “He can be very slow, but his mood is like a fire!” My personal favourite supplement however would have to be a new, 20-minute interview between Kent Jones and Claire Denis—one of my all-time favourite critics talks to one of my all-time favourite directors! Denis was assistant director on Paris, Texas, Wenders having managed to convince her that the best way to move forward on making her first feature would be to help him make his movie. Her stories are rich, vivid, funny—she affectionately calls John Lurie a snake-face; I guess you can do that when you’re French—and full of love for what would become a defining moment in her life.

Roman à clé: Marina Zenovich probes deeper into the Polasnki scandal

It is a subject that’s no doubt ruined a lot of dinner parties over the years, chained as it is to one of those bottom lines that inspire such knee-jerk responses as to block out rational discussion. The subject is Roman Polanski, to some a filmmaker with an outstanding legacy accompanied by a biography rife with dynamicism, romance and tragedy, to others a pedophile. Period. Well, for those disposed to pursuing the subject a little further, who might appreciate some detailed analysis cultivated away from the heat lamps of unshakable moral righteousness, you’d do well to consult Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a smart, unfussy, engrossing documentary that examines the farcical trial which finally led to Polanski’s fleeing the US in 1978 before its conclusion.

For those just tuning in: in March of 1977, Polanski met with Samantha Geimer at Jack Nicholson’s house on Mulholland Drive. They were to take photos. Geimer was interested in a career as a model, perhaps an actress. Polanski had already helped the “arrival” of the teenage actress Nastassja Kinski, with whom he’d also had a notorious affair. The informal photo shoot, at which neither Nicholson nor anyone else was present, quickly turned into something far more tawdry, if not exactly shocking. Polanski gave drugs to Geimer and had sex with her. She was only 13-years-old. Polanski was subsequently arrested and changed with a litany of offences, including rape and sodomy, eventually pleading guilty only to having consensual sex with an under-aged person when evidence, ie: soiled panties, made it clear that a plea bargain would be highly advisable. But the case developed in such a way that closure was to prove far more complicated and elusive than either Polanski, Geimer or their respective attorneys had hoped for. Geimer, who has publicly forgiven Polanski and even advocated for his being given the Academy Award for The Pianist, has said that in the end she felt like both of them got stuck with life sentences, so relentless was the aftermath and media frenzy.

Zenovich’s agenda with Wanted and Desired necessarily divorces itself from sermonizing over Polanski’s unquestioned culpability as an instigator in an unlawful and immoral sexual act. The concern of the film rather is to shed light on the audacious miscarriage of justice to which Polanski and, in effect, Geimer were both subjected to at the hands of the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband. Judge Rittenband was himself a known ladies’ man and, more to the point, a tireless seeker of media attention. Having died in 1994, he’s unable to defend himself here, and it’s a pity, because he is so thoroughly lambasted by everyone involved, not only those working for Polanski’s defense, but by Geimer and her own attorney, Roger Gunson, who was so outraged by the degree of indecision, manipulation and outright stage management imposed on the case by Rittenband that, in a memorable closing interview, he confesses that he actually sympathizes with Polanski’s choice to flee justice under the given circumstances.

It’s at once a great story and precisely the sort that everyone only thinks they know. Zenovich works through the material methodically, utilizing fresh and mostly insightful testimony from a wide variety of subjects with diverse or opposing stakes in Polanski’s reputation—even Mia Farrow, who clearly has her own opinions about older men giving unwholesome attention to young girls. With an elegant interweaving of archival photographs and home movies, Zenovich manages to account for the almost unimaginable hardships of Polanski’s life—his survival of the Holocaust, the slaughter of his wife and unborn child and the horrific implications made by the press in its wake—without ever using these facts as an excuse for Polanski’s own aberrant behaviour. And of course the wealth of contextualizing fragments from Polanski’s own often very dark films—especially The Tenant, in which Polanski starred, and whose trailer promises that “no one can do it to you like Roman Polanski!”—is exploited to considerable effect by Zenovich and her editor P.G. Morgan, whose contribution to the film’s shape was great enough to merit his own writing credit.

“For as far back as I can remember, the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred.” So goes the opening sentence of Polanski’s 1984 memoir, Roman. His life and its scandals, nearly as much as his body of work, which includes some of the most simultaneously seductive and grotesque American films ever made, embodies both our collective fantasy life and its shadow side as few others do. We may just understand both of these things a little better for peering into the nitty-gritty of how it all came to be.