The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Two tales of the American interior
PARIS, TEXAS
Thursday, Film 4, 11.15pm
SHOT in four weeks using a script which was incomplete at the start of filming, Wim Wenders’s 1984 masterpiece went on to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes. From its soundtrack to its cinematography to its performances, it remains one of the most iconic films of the decade as well as one of the best road movies ever.
Wenders, who is German, said he wanted to make a film about America, and whether he succeeded or not he certainly brings an outsider’s eye to the country.
He and regular cinematographer Robby Müller turn it into a place of neondrenched motels, unforgiving desert roads and spectacular sunsets, always finding the oddest and most interesting locations for the action – a Californian diner located beside a massive model dinosaur, for instance, or a backstreet building in the Texan town of Port Arthur decorated with a huge mural of the Statue of Liberty.
Müller would go on to shoot Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law and that film’s star, the hipster’s hipster John Lurie, can be seen in a cameo role here.
The famous soundtrack, meanwhile, is by Ry Cooder, while the script was co-written by celebrated actor and playwright Sam Shepard.
Harry Dean Stanton plays Travis Henderson, who we first meet marching doggedly across the desert and then collapsing in a bar. Among his few possessions is a phone number for a Walter Henderson (Dean Stockwell), the brother he hasn’t seen for four years and who thinks him dead. Walter and his French wife Anne (Aurore Clément) have adopted Travis’s seven-year-old son Hunter (Hunter Carson, son of Shepard’s co-writer
LM Kit Carson) after he was mysteriously dropped off at the door of their Los Angeles home around the time Travis disappeared.
Travis won’t say where he has been and seems to have little memory of what has happened to him, but he and Hunter gradually re-connect.
When Anne reveals that Hunter’s mother Jane wires money for him monthly from a bank in Houston, Travis and Hunter set off to find her – enter Nastassja Kinski, in a blonde wig and that iconic pink Mohair sweater-dress.
THINGS HEARD AND SEEN
Netflix, Now streaming
Families swapping the city for the country and finding trouble as a result is a much-favoured plot device in horror films. You find it in everything from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Natalie James’s 2020 indie hit Relic.
Here the city hipsters heading for the sticks – in this case an ivy-clad town in upstate New York – are Catherine Claire (Amanda Seyfried) and her husband George (British actor James Norton). The year is 1980.
Catherine’s a painter and art restorer with a good job in New York, but she agrees to throw it all up when George, who has just finished a PhD in art history, secures a teaching job at a private university.
So, along with their four-yearold daughter Franny, they head for the small town of Chosen
and a new life in a grand, if somewhat ramshackle 19thcentury house whose previous inhabitants have left behind a piano – and some kind of ghost.
True to trope, the spirit first shows itself to Franny as a lank-haired woman and then to Catherine as a series of reflections cascading around her kitchen.
Lights flicker, rocking chairs rock and of course the piano plays itself. Sometimes the smell of car fumes invades the master bedroom.
Meanwhile, George’s new boss Floyd (F Murray Abraham) introduces himself as a believer in spiritualism, and he and Catherine find an instant connection and secretly arrange a séance to try to find out more about the spirit presence.
But as Catherine investigates further and uncovers more information about the previous inhabitants of the house, the secrets and stresses in her own marriage are laid bare.
She’s bulimic and is hiding the fact from George, he’s a serial adulterer whose early morning jogs end in a tumble with free-spirited university dropout Willis (Natalia Dyer from Stranger Things).
Her friend Eddy Vayle (Alex Neustaedter) is Catherine’s gardener and general handyman, but he too has a secret concerning the house. As tensions rise and George’s dishonesty and faithlessness threaten to ruin him, things take a turn for the perilous.
Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, whose infrequent output includes 2003’s American Splendor, it’s adapted from Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear. One for a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Lights flicker, rocking chairs rock and the piano plays itself. Sometimes the smell of car fumes invades the master bedroom