Paris, Texas (1984)
Where else to start when it comes to cinematic self-discovery than with Wim Wenders’ spellbinding work of German New Cinema adrift in the American Southwest? In perhaps one of the all-time great road movies, the auteur filmmaker and photographer crafts a character study made up of vast, melancholic landscapes, mapping the topography of one man’s lonely, aching heart across the empty, arid deserts of West Texas. Harry Dean Stanton gives a performance of suitably intense, mysterious alienation as Travis Henderson, a man who wanders out of the wilderness, not knowing who he is. Reconnecting with his brother (Dean Stockwell) and young son (Hunter Carson), Travis begins to pick up the pieces of the life that he led four years earlier, before he vanished without a trace.
Into the film’s nocturnal, fluorescent tableaux of gas-station outposts, unoccupied phone booths and highways that snake like rivers, Wenders suffuses a potent sense of emotional exile and abandonment. Later, an emotionally fraught reunion through a one-way mirror with his estranged wife, Jane (Natassja Kinski), shatters the film’s quietly forlorn spell outright, while forcing Travis to reckon with his failures as a husband and a father. But it is through inspecting the wreckage of this broken past that Travis uncovers a way to repair something lost long ago, to redeem himself and set his loved ones free to start healing.