A confused man walks out of the American desert. How did he come to this state? That's a driving force of the film.

WARNING: SPOILERS

How long has it been since I’ve seen this film? This long: I thought it was the one where Nastassja Kinski was married to John Savage. That’s “Maria’s Lovers.” This is the one where she’s married to Harry Dean Stanton.

The confusion makes some sense. Both are independent films, released in 1984, from foreign directors. Andrey Konchalovsky, a Russian, directed “Maria’s Lovers” while here it’s Wim Wenders of Germany. That might make a good filmfest, by the way: movies set in America, with American actors, directed by foreigners.

A lot of “Paris, Texas” went over my head when I first saw it in 1984. It’s a story of a crazy, maddening love, and I hadn’t experienced my own crazy, maddening love yet. It’s about a responsible man trying to save his ne’er-do-well brother, and that would’ve fallen on deaf ears for me back then. Now it resonates too deeply. 

I’d forgotten it won the Palme d’Or. I’d forgotten it was written by Sam Shepard—though much of the dialogue seems improvised. Watching it the other night at SIFF Egyptian, a 4K rerelease on its 40th anniversary, I kept liking it, and liking it, and then Nastassja Kinski shows up looking more beautiful than any woman has a right to … and it kind of dragged for me. Apparently Shepard was on set and adapting the story as it went along but he couldn’t be there for the final scenes in Houston. It shows.

Red cap, shirt, car, sweater
Does the opening resonate more in 2024 than in 1984? Out of the American desert, a confused man emerges wearing a suit and a bright red baseball cap. Unlike most of the MAGA crowd, though, this guy is all but mute. (Stanton doesn’t say anything for the first half hour.) He collapses, is revived by a doctor, keeps going. He’s not so much wandering as making a beeline for something and somewhere.

From the scraps of paper on his person, the man who revives him, the Pennsylvania Dutch-looking Dr. Ulmer (Austrian actor Bernhard Wicki), calls his brother, Walt (Stockwell), in LA, who flies out to get him. His wife Anne (French actress Aurore Clement) asks what they should she tell their son. Walt says to say he’s away on business but the wife nixes that idea. Then just tell him the truth, Walt says. It takes a while for this conversation to make sense.

When Walt arrives at the makeshift desert hospital, which looks like a sad little motel, his brother Travis has already flown the coop and Walt is left to pay for his belongings. Then he tracks him down in the desert—no mean feat. Then he coaxes him into the car. He goes to buy him clothes but Travis bolts again. One wonders what Travis is thinking. Does he just need to keep moving? Away from his past maybe?

This scenario repeats itself several times: Walt as responsible but exasperated adult, Travis as blinking, innocent troublemaker. They’re going to fly to LA but Travis suddenly can’t stand being in an airplane. They’re going to drive but Travis wants the exact same rental car they had before. Eventually they make LA, where Travis is greeted warmly by Anne and warily by their son, Hunter (Hunter Carson, son of co-screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson and actress Karen Black). Hunter turns out to be Travis’ son.

The middle of the movie is whether father and son can reconnect. There’s a heartbreaking scene where Travis waits on the corner opposite Hunter’s school to walk him home, but Hunter is with a friend, is embarrassed by the old man, and gets into a car with his friend. When admonished by his parents, he says “Nobody walks.”

Eventually he warms to the old man. The family watches Super 8 footage of all of them, plus Hunter’s mom, Jane (Kinski), from a trip five years earlier. Despite the difference in ages (35 years separate the actors) and looks (he’s normal, she’s Nastassja Kinski), Jane and Travis seem in love. Everyone seems so happy. So what happened? How did he become the confused dude in the red cap in the desert? That’s the question we wonder throughout. It’s like the shark beneath the surface in Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.”

I assume Anne tells Travis about the money they’ve been receiving from Jane—via a bank in Houston—because she’s worried they’ll lose Hunter and she wants to push Travis toward Jane. It works, but not in the way she wants. Now Hunter wants to go with him—and does. And the camera follows them. And we don’t see Walt and Anne again. Shame. Something goes out of the movie when they go out of the movie.

The bank in Houston turns out to be a drive-thru, but they know the day she makes her deposits and stake it out, with walkie-talkies, like kids in a caper. The red of his cap reappears in the red shirts father and son wear, and in the red compact car Jane drives. They follow it to a sketchy section of town.

I’ll cut to the chase: She works at a peep show, like in the Madonna video “Open Your Heart,” where men watch women in different fantasy outfits and settings (nurse, waitress), the women can’t see them, and the men talk through a phone. Travis orders up a blonde with short hair, gets the nurse, tries another booth, and bingo, there she is. He asks several halting questions, she attempts to take off her sweater and he stops her, then leaves. At his earliest convenience, he goes to a bar. Hunter tells him he reeks and walks out. The kid is the adult in the room.

But Travis returns to the peep show, gets Jane again, and this time, without specifically telling her who he is, he tells her who he is. This is the moment we’re supposed to get the shark from “Jaws” but it turns out to be a big fish. He relays a story about a man so crazy in love with a woman that he couldn’t leave her alone to go to work, so he kept quitting his jobs, and then getting another when he needed money again. Over and over. Then he began to drink, and get mean, and he tied a cowbell to her ankle so he’d always know where she was. And it’s a long, drawn-out monologue. And throughout, there’s a dawning look of realization on her face. Then it’s her turn for a long drawn-out monologue. The climax of their intermingling stories is when he wakes up and finds himself on fire. She’d set fire to their trailer home and left with the boy. And in a way he remained on fire. How she began working in a peep show, who knows.

It's an ending that peters out. The mystery was better as a mystery.

Widening gyre
You’ve got to hand it to those Henderson brothers, though. They look like Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell but somehow managed to land Nastassja Kinski and Aurore Clement. Nice work, boys. 

As a 61-year-old—older Harry Dean in the movie—I liked it better than I did as a 21-year-old, and Wenders has some nice moments in those peep show rooms, where Trevor’s face is silhouetted by her head, and vice-versa. I like the detail of the exposed insulation on the woman’s side of the one-way mirror, too.

But it’s not top-tier for me the way it is for some. I’m remembering this period now. I was coming of age into a time when popcorn movies became a little dumber, and important movies became a little more boring. That center, where we’d get a good movie with a story that resonated, wasn’t holding.