Paris, Texas

The subtractive test passes in the frame and gives in the middle. The desert walk, the silence and the refusal to fly are each paid later: the man who will not leave the ground is the man who, by his own account through the glass, once tied his wife to a stove with a bell on her ankle, and who still cannot stand where a family stands. The Super 8 film is required, the first image of Jane and the first time Hunter sees his parents as a couple, and nothing in the two booth scenes could go. What gives: the Los Angeles movement is long for what it moves; Walt and Anne’s claim on the boy is stated more than dramatised and dropped once the truck leaves; the man on the overpass is atmosphere.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a love that wants to possess becomes a prison for both, and the man who made it can repair what he broke only by returning what he took and removing himself. Travis gives Hunter back to Jane and does not stay, and the film calls this neither redemption nor failure. A second truth is given in image: the one-way mirror is the marriage, and recognition is a matter of which side of the glass is lit. The trade in the booth is shown without spectacle. What holds it below the bar: much of the film’s power is mood, the Los Angeles household discloses little beyond its warmth, and Jane’s truth is given only in her short answer, so the disclosure is chiefly the man’s.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The landscape: a man in a red cap crossing a desert of mesas under a hawk, the long Texas roads, the freeway lights seen from the hill above Los Angeles, the Houston towers and the green-lit car park at the close, all in Robby Müller’s colour, neon against dusk, with Ry Cooder’s slide guitar sounding a lament over it. The human kind is higher: the Super 8 film watched in a dark room; the second booth scene, a man telling a story with his back to the glass while the woman’s face changes behind it; the reunion in the hotel room, seen from outside. Held at the figure because the middle movement runs level for long stretches, and some of the landscape’s height is the beauty of photography more than of event.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The myth is built more than evoked. The wanderer comes out of the wilderness speechless, is taken in, recovers speech and a son, finds the lost wife and goes back out: the return of Odysseus without the homecoming, and The Searchers (1956) inverted, since Ford’s hero restores a child to a family he cannot enter, and Travis restores a child to its mother and drives into the dark. The origin is load-bearing: a vacant lot in Paris, Texas, bought as the place of his own conception, an empty patch of ground in a photograph carried as the ground of the self. Held below the bar because much of the archetype is borrowed from the western, and a German director’s America of motels and billboards sometimes leans toward the figure of America rather than the place.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is Wenders’s own road film, Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976), where a man and a child or two men drift through a landscape and the journey is the film; the American western and its desert; the European art film’s view of America. The turns are real: a road film that arrives, its destination a confession; a climax played as two static conversations through a mirror; silence made the hero’s first state; a melodramatic subject, a broken family and the sex trade, played without melodrama. The stake was real: an American film made on his own terms after the long trouble of Hammett with Coppola’s studio. Held well below the bar because the form is a proven path carried to its finish, and the man and child on the road were already his.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that two people who have hurt each other can see each other only across a barrier. The form moves from silence to speech and from the widest frames to the smallest room, desert, then house, then booth, a stage on which one person sees and the other does not. The Super 8 film prepares it, a past that can be watched and cannot answer. The second booth scene completes it: the story told by a man who will not face the glass to a woman who cannot see through it, until the light is turned. In ordinary shot and counter-shot the scene would lose the knowledge that they can be honest only when unseen. Held below the top because the first two movements use the road film’s inherited grammar, beautifully, rather than a form remade for this subject.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Forty-two years of return are evidence, and the questions have stayed open: whether Travis’s departure is atonement, flight or a repetition of his first abandonment; whether the film sees Jane or only sees Travis seeing her, a question the one-way mirror makes its own and feminist criticism has pressed; what the vacant lot is, an origin, a delusion or a grave; whether the film’s America is a place or a European’s dream of one. Formally it rewards return: mirror, Super 8 screen, windscreen and billboard rhyme as surfaces of looking, and red and green run from the cap in the desert to the light in the car park. Held at the figure because much of the writing on it returns to its look and its music, and the central drama, once the booth is understood, does not keep shifting.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Released in 1984, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is a synthesis: the European art film’s patience joined to the American landscape and the western’s archetype as neither tradition had joined them, and a road film shown able to end in a room, with a monologue as its climax. It perfected a manner more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or in 1984; a look of desert, neon and saturated dusk and a sound of slide guitar that became a common grammar of the American landscape in later film, advertising and music video, noted as breadth rather than weighed; and its standing as the touchstone of the road film. What it redirected in narrative form is harder to name than what it gave to image and sound.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over forty-two years. The form is whole: the film survives in its one theatrical cut, and restorations for home video are repair, not a different film. Presence has been continuous: art-house revival, television, every home format, a collector’s edition, teaching, and two images, Kinski in a pink sweater behind glass and Stanton in a red cap in the desert, that circulate beyond the film’s own audience. The surface ages little. The motels, payphones and walkie-talkies are of 1984, but a road film of the American West wears them as landscape rather than as fashion. Credited at the usual figure for its span and not the widest: its presence, though wide for an art film, stays largely within the audience of art cinema.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The making bears weight throughout. Robby Müller’s photography, natural light and neon, holds a man small in wide frames and, in the narrow booth, lays two faces over each other in one reflection. Ry Cooder’s score is sparse and placed. Harry Dean Stanton carries the first half almost without speech and the climax almost without movement; Nastassja Kinski listens behind the glass. Peter Przygodda’s cutting lets the monologues run. The costs: the Los Angeles movement is loosely shaped and its scenes run past their point; Walt and Anne are written as functions; Hunter Carson is natural, but the boy’s scenes with his father depend on charm; the last movement of the ending is slow. Below the films that bear weight in every department, The Third Man and Chinatown at 9.0.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the comedy of Travis learning from the maid how a rich father walks, and the confession through the mirror. One law governs both: Travis can approach the people he loves only through a performance or a barrier, and the film holds each person at the distance from which they can be seen. The desert and the booth obey it, and so do the Super 8 screen and the walkie-talkies in the pickup, which let father and son talk without facing each other. The barrier is the film’s law for everyone, not for Jane alone. The tone runs from deadpan comedy to grief and never breaks. Held below the top because the Los Angeles household runs by a family drama’s ordinary rules, and Walt and Anne’s claim on the boy is raised under one law and dropped unanswered.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what a film of about 145 minutes holds. Consciousness: Travis’s, held from inside by silence and then by his own story, and Jane’s, glimpsed in her answer. The family across three households: two brothers, a marriage destroyed by jealousy, a child raised by others, and a father’s and mother’s story behind Travis’s own. Sexuality as commerce, in the booth. Land and nation as landscape: desert, highway, the vacant lot, the city seen from its hills. Labour in glimpses: Walt’s billboards, the bank, the club. What holds the axis lowest is that all of it is held through one man and one family: the state, history and the economy enter only as roads and towers, and the sacred is a stranger preaching on an overpass. Above Punch-Drunk Love at 6.0, below In the Mood for Love at 7.6.

Score: 7.4 / 10