Paris, Texas

Saw Paris, Texas, a film which starts out with a man wandering the desert. He collapses in a tiny town, spurring his reunion with his family. The man says almost nothing for the first hour of the film. He is always with a pair of binoculars, surveying things from far away, remote, untouchable. As we uncover more about his past, we hear about an old romance which went wrong in every way a relationship can go wrong (when we finally hear the story, it's unbelievably gothic.) This relationship produced a child who is on the cusp between being a sincere 70s child and a precocious 80s child. The silent man tries to somehow repair the destroyed family he left to wander the desert.

The film is slow, brooding and comfy, it soothes the viewer with moaning steel guitars and pulls us in with lingering shots of the characters. The first half of the film, where the silent man is revealing his past and re-entering the world, is slightly counter-culture-ish. It's not pushy or anything, but the family who collects him works at a billboard manufacturing place. The weird, monolithic consumer icons which dwarf them are placed in opposition to the wild, craggy mountains that surround the mute protagonist. He wants to walk his son to school, but the son (who is obsessed with Star Wars and is shown inaccessibly playing a video game) whines "Nobody walks anymore. Everyone drives."

The second half of the film is mainly focused on the man's past and on his efforts to heal that past. This is done in a believable way. There is no panacea that leaves us feeling justice has been done. We feel (ie I feel) that the characters have at last moved past their suffering, but that there is more messy work to be done. I found it intriguing that they distinguish between giving up old pains and giving in to the despair of those pains. Fun stuff.

The imagery is very powerful. As mentioned, there's the towering billboards, but there's also bright, coloured lights (usually red, blue, or green) everywhere. At one point the man's face is reflected, superimposed over his ex-wife's face. It's a stirring image, but I don't know what to make of it. The final emotional showdown happens on either side of a two-way mirror, so only one character can see the other at a time. I believe this has metaphorical significance (as it is just too cute not to) but I can't see what that might be. An interesting movie, quite long but friendly and deliberate.