Paris, Texas

Paris, Texas is an unlikely masterpiece, bringing together an astonishingly talented but highly disparate group of individuals each of whom provide their most important and successful contributions to the cinema. This is unlikely enough but what is truly extraordinary is that their individual contributions should gel into such an dazzling ensemble. Paris, Texas is an important and accomplished movie not only because it is a slow but riveting tale that comments at every turn on both modern American and old European culture, but also because its very form represents the highest triumph of the collective movie-making process.

The acting and production credits read like a roll-call of modern film icons. German director Wim Wenders, who has made a series of powerful films about alienation and the loneliness of the soul, has never made a more profound yet more traditional narrative than this one. Screenwriter Sam Shepherd draws on many of Wenders' themes and enhances them with his brilliant ear and eye for the American experience. Cinematographer Robby Muller shoots the stunning urban and deserted landscapes as if inside the characters' heads. Finally, Ry Cooder's haunting guitar brings a further layer of coherence, emotion and resonance to the proceedings. The understated, underrated Harry Dean Stanton is quite brilliant (and became temporarily famous) in his role as the wandering loner Travis: comic, contradictory and tragic by turns; Dean Stockwell, too, gives his greatest performance as Travis's down-to-earth brother Walt; and Nastassja Kinski sets the screen alight with her brief, scintillating, subtley-crafted performance as the loner's former lover.

What brings all of these people together is Travis's son Hunter, who Walt and his wife are bringing up following Travis's disappearance into the wilderness. Critics of Paris, Texas argue that the extraordinary, climactic 20-minute scene during which Travis explains his disappearance is both artificial and laboured. But it is not just the metaphorical substance of this scene that makes it the vital conclusion to Paris, Texas, it is the fact that in his careful articulation this laconic loner slowly emerges to be both moved and deeply moving.

Released in the UK against such stiff competition as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (surely one of the most important American movies of the decade), Paris, Texas was still the most sophisticated, beautifully executed and important film of 1984. One only hopes that there are immaculate prints still out there. To lose one microsecond of that once-in-a-lifetime synthesis of skill and creative genius would be disastrous. Wim Wenders' film is one of the great half dozen movies of the last 30 years.

Reviewed by Douglas McCabe