Paris, Texas: Wim Wenders Restored in Florence
Forty years after its release, Paris, Texas by Wim Wenders remains a film of rare emotional power, one that still speaks to anyone who has ever felt lost, broken, a stranger in their own life. It is not only the story of Travis, played by Harry Dean Stanton with a vulnerability that pierces the screen: it is also the portrait of an America seen through the eyes of a European director, who catches its mythic grandeur along with its contradictions, its solitudes, its fractures.
Travis’s journey is an impossible return: he comes back to look for his son, Hunter, and his wife, Jane, played by a magnetic Nastassja Kinski. Travis almost never speaks; his silence is a void that says more than a thousand words. And when he finally does speak, he does so hidden behind glass, in that Dallas peep-show booth that becomes an extraordinary metaphor for cinema itself: Travis tells his story, and Jane listens, sees his reflection, but cannot truly touch him. It is one of the most intense moments in the history of film, where Wenders — helped by Sam Shepard’s screenplay — lets the tragedy of lost love detonate in a scene of glances, words, and reflections.
Paris, Texas forty years on: a wounded America and the gaze of Nastassja Kinski
Nastassja Kinski’s role is essential: Jane is the film’s invisible center, the woman Travis loved and hurt, but who in turn had to flee. Kinski makes this character fragile, maternal, guilty and innocent all at once. Her beauty, never flaunted, is steeped in melancholy and hope, and her gaze in the peep-show scene is a mirror that gives Travis — and us — their whole story back.
To watch Paris, Texas again today is also to ask what remains of the American dream. Wenders’s America is not the one of skyscrapers and success, but of endless roads, dusty motels, and desert landscapes that tell of modern man’s solitude. Paris is, in fact, a remote Texas town. This is a film about family fractures, emotional distances, guilt that cannot be erased. And in an age when we are always connected yet often unable to truly communicate, this story of miscommunication and the longing for redemption resonates all the more strongly.
That is exactly why the restoration carried out by the Cineteca di Bologna takes on a special value today: bringing Paris, Texas back to the big screen is not merely a matter of film scholarship but an act of love toward a work that deserves to be seen — or seen again — in its natural dimension, that of the cinema, where the immensity of the landscapes captured by Robby Müller and the aching notes of Ry Cooder’s score can recover all their force. It is an invitation to look again, to listen, to truly feel: just as Travis and Jane try to do, in a film that continues, after forty years, to speak to the heart.
In Florence, the restored version screens as part of “Non Solo Cinema in Manifattura” at Manifattura Tabacchi, in the original language with subtitles.
