Paris, Texas

The Cinematheque ran it on a Saturday and I went in with the reputation sitting on my chest, which is the worst possible way to see anything. Fifteen minutes later I’d forgotten I had opinions.

It opens on a man in a red cap walking out of the desert with an empty water jug, and Wenders holds him there long enough that you stop waiting for an explanation and start reading the walk instead. Harry Dean Stanton doesn’t speak for a long stretch and never plays it as mystery. He plays it as a man rebooting in order: walking first, then drinking, then riding in a car, then finally, reluctantly, talking. When he does talk it sounds like a machine coming back online with parts missing.

Robby Müller shot it, and for the first hour I was mostly just being handed things — a sky doing four colors at once over a two-lane road, motel neon against dusk, a Houston skyline going pink through a windshield. It’s a European’s idea of America, and I mean that as a compliment: everything ordinary is being looked at like it just landed here. Ry Cooder’s slide guitar hangs over all of it, so thin it’s barely present, one note at a time. Three weeks later it’s still in my head.

It’s a European’s idea of America, and I mean that as a compliment: everything ordinary is being looked at like it just landed here.

The middle is where it got me, and I wasn’t expecting it there. Travis picks his kid up from school and they walk home on opposite sides of the street, and the boy starts copying his father’s walk, big loose swinging arms, and block by block they close the gap by a foot. Nobody says anything. The scene knows exactly what it’s doing and has the nerve to do it silently. Earlier there’s a living room full of people watching a Super 8 reel of a life that no longer exists, a setup I’ve seen imitated a hundred times and never this patiently.

Then the last half hour, which is the part people warn you about, correctly. A booth in a Houston peep show, one-way glass, a telephone on the wall. He can see her. She sees a mirror. He turns his chair around and talks facing away, because he cannot say the thing while looking at anyone. Most films would stage a monologue like that with an orchestra swelling underneath. This one gives you a man in a bad chair with his back to the camera, and Nastassja Kinski’s face on the other side of the glass going through about six weathers. I have not sat that still in a theater in years.

Is it too long? A little. The California stretch with Dean Stockwell and Aurore Clément idles, and there’s a patch where the movie seems as unsure as Travis about what happens next. I didn’t mind. Something this patient earns the right to drift.

What I keep circling is that it isn’t a mystery at all. You do find out what happened, and the answer is small and ugly and entirely ordinary, and the film takes no pleasure in it whatsoever. The actual question is whether a person who wrecked something can do one useful thing afterward without making it about himself.

The Cinematheque crowd sat through the whole credit roll. Nobody wanted to be the one who stood up first and turned it back into a Saturday.