With: Harry Dean Stanton (Travis), Dean Stockwell (Walt), Nastassja Kinski (Jane)
Hunter Carson (Hunter), Aurore Clément (Anne), 
Bernhard Wickioy (Dr. Ulmer)
Director: Wim Wenders
Producer: Don Guest
Written by: Sam Shepard
Adaptation by: L. M. Kit Carson
Executive producer: Chris Sievernich
Photography: Robby Müller
Editor: Peter Przygodda
Music: Ry Cooder
Art Direction: Kate Altman
REVIEWS

Wim Wenders won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and had a major art-house hit with this moody existential odyssey across the epic landscapes of the American Southwest.

“Paris, Texas, aptly titled, evokes something foreign in the American experience. The film is inspired by Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles – in particular, “the image of somebody leaving the freeway and walking straight into the desert,” according to director Wenders.  That somebody is Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis, who staggers into the film on returning from nowhere, where he’s been for a number of years.  Travis tentatively reunites with his young son, Hunter, and together they hit the road in search of the boy’s mother; the dream of making the family whole again finds its nightmare edge when Mom (Nastassja Kinski) is found working in a peep show.  Still, Travis persists, reaching her on her own terms: through glass.  Robby Müller’s cinematography pursues a fantasy of the American West in capturing its more bizarre reality, much as Travis and Hunter pursue a fantasy of the American family amid the choked violence of the one they have.”

— Judy Bloch, Pacific Film Archive

"Cannes juries can be as capable of worthy-minded myopia as Academy award voters, yet this is one year they called it just right. Paris, Texas isn’t just the most enduringly beautiful and widely cherished title from that year’s respectable competition crop, but a film that remains, for this critic, the crowning achievement of Wenders’ speckled, frequently brilliant career: the one in which his dual inclinations toward aesthetic grandeur and emotional intimacy find their most serene meeting point, outclassing even such subsequent masterclasses as Wings of Desire (which netted him the best director prize at the festival three years later) and Pina.  It’s a cinematic peak, too, for the spare, sandy writing of Sam Shepard, the actor-playwright whose tough dramatic sculpting of American male crisis hasn’t always translated as well to the screen as it does to the stage...

Wenders brought a certain European elegance to Shepard’s intellectual machismo (the title may refer to an individual town in the US, but it also alludes to the film’s own transatlantic identity). But the men share a romantic fascination with the road, that asphalt spine of American geography and culture alike, leading travellers either to the country’s heart or its great beyond. For dessicated protagonist Travis (so searchingly played by the great Harry Dean Stanton), it takes him in both directions: reunited with his son after going walkabout in the Lone Star desert, cueing a search for his similarly unmoored wife, he can only locate his family home by leaving it.

Paris, Texas is a road movie: that most essentially American of genres, so beloved by Wenders... But it’s also, in a muted, horse-free manner, a western. Beneath its cool urban trappings, it’s a story of detached men scouring the frontier to restore domestic order to a world out of balance."

- Guy Lodge, The Guardian
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