Three films by Wim Wenders
Paris, Texas (1984), Lisbon Story (1994) and Don't Come Knocking (2005)
One of several occasional articles on the films of German director Wim Wenders
The work of German director Wim Wenders was enormously important to me, beginning in my college days when I saw his early films. In the days before video stores, much less streaming, each major language department brought numerous films to the campus, so European films were plentiful, literallydozens each year. Wenders' early films “Alice in the Cities,” ”Kings of the Road,” ”The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,” and especially “Wrong Move”— back then the original title “Falsche Bewegung” was mistranslated as “Wrong Movement”— were mysterious and slow and really beautifully directed. They immersed the viewer in a modern West Germany (before the fall of the Berlin Wall) that was still insular, for all its modernity, ununited with the rest of Europe, growing with confidence in its own postwar identity.
Wenders was part of the renaissance in German filmmaking that was called New German Cinema, a generation that included Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Volker Schlöndorff. Their first films were done cheaply, and while sometimes funded by German television, they had a streak of independence and personal style.
After Wenders produced a masterpiece — his 1975 production “The American Friend” with Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper, its story based on two of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels — his career took a fatal turn: He agreed to an invitation by Francis Ford Coppola to make a movie in the U.S. This turned into a bitter experience, and while Wenders went on delivering feature-length narrative films and documentaries at a pace of almost one per year for the next 30 years, the quality of his films has dropped off precipitously. He made only one more great film, “Wings of Desire,” and a few near-misses (“Paris, Texas” and the “Wings of Desire” sequel “Far Away, So Close!”), as well as some documentaries (“The Buena Vista Social Club”) and -- significantly -- music videos for pop artists. Everything else is sorely lacking, and in addition to “Paris, Texas” I’ll discuss a couple of the latter.
The main thing that was wrong with his output after “The American Friend” and the cursed Coppola production of “Hammet” (1982) was that his films became more and more sentimental. The first signs of this can be seen in “Wings of Desire,” which despite its focus on kindly angelic beings and an ethereal blond circus aerialist, balances out its sweetness with a number of dark moments. Following that movie, which almost everybody, including me, loves, his films became typified by thin plots based on emotions of longing and loneliness, with male protagonists who are alienated from society and — fatefully — attempt to resolve their alienation by reuniting with family.
It’s true that his early work also featured alienated men, most strongly in “The Goalie’s Anxiety” and in “Wrong Move,” but in his later films the source of the alienation is usually based in alienation from one’s family. This means casting children in prominent parts, which in Wenders’ case means using them to provide moments, or sometimes long minutes, of playful sweetness. It also means -- and this is key — that heterosexual family structures play large roles, when they never did when he began. Indeed, the coldness with which the grown protagonist’s mother declares she’s leaving their home town, no forwarding address given, is like a cold shower at the beginning of “Wrong Move” and typifies the role of family in his early films. Beginning with “Paris, Texas,” this changed.
Paris, Texas (1984)
Alienation from the nuclear family is one thing; characters who wish to put the family back together are what sink “Don’t Come Knocking” and “Paris, Texas.” The latter film, from 1984, was almost universally lauded at the time. The basic plot is that breaking up with his wife (Nastassja Kinski) years earlier has driven Travis — more or less a starving ghost walking in a straight line across barren American desert — mad. Played by Harry Dean Stanton, Travis is too depressed to even speak for the first quarter of the film. But the plot, thin as it is, is resolved when Travis picks up his son from his brother (Dean Stockwell), locates his estranged wife in Houston, and leaves the kid (Hunter Carson, son of co-writer L.M. Kit Carson) with her, before apparently disappearing again.
We’re left to suppose that reuniting the kid with his mother fixes whatever is broken in Travis by reversing the damage he did years previously. This requires an assumption that the kid will be better off with his mother, whose only apparent means of support is working at a peep show, than with his stable, middle-class uncle. I don’t buy it now, and if I didn’t figure this out when it was first released, it was because I just didn’t know enough about adult life to know that the kid would have a worse life with someone like his mother. (Why she is damaged as an adult, we never find out, but I hope Travis paid for the room at the Hyatt Regency where we see her embrace the boy, because for all we know her only means of support is her job at the peep show.) There’s no evidence that anything has changed with Travis at the end of the picture, either. We’re still left with as many questions as we had ten minutes into the movie, and yet this reunion is supposed to be a happy ending.
The only great parts of “Paris, Texas” are the cinematography. Reunited with the great Robby Müller, who shot all of his first films up to “The American Friend,” Wenders’ fascination with the American southwest, and with the strangeness of both its limitless landscapes and its neon-lit small towns, is given full rein. I remember reading an interview with him in which he excitedly pointed to the tinting at the top of American car windshields as a sort of special effect, something bizarrely American that enables a car’s occupants to see the world differently just by tipping their heads up to look through it. Sure enough, the film captures this effect. The scene at the peep show, where he can see his wife through the window but she can’t see him, is very inventively and beautifully shot.1 And nothing beats that first image of the movie, where Travis appears out of the desert landscape like an insect, wearing a red baseball cap and a dirty suit, walking in a straight line to God knows where. Watch the film for these images, less for the story.
Lisbon Story (1994)
The actor Rüdiger Vogler was the lead in Winders’ early films; it’s he who wanders impassively through “Wrong Move” and trudges through “The Goalie’s Anxiety.” Handsome and long-haired, his poker face was only occasionally relieved by a warm smile, but his stillness and reserve were perfect for Wenders’ themes of urban alienation and loneliness.
In 1994, twenty years later, he rejoined Wenders again for the comic urban pastorale “Lisbon Story,” in which he plays a sound engineer named Winter who answers the plea of his director friend Friedrich to help him on a stalled project. This means traveling from Germany to Lisbon, a journey which allows Wenders to indulge his road trip obsession and which gives rise to several slapstick situations and iris-out endings to scenes that recall the films of Buster Keaton.
Vogler’s poker face is also appropriate for deadpan comedy, it turns out. But his performance, understated as it is, is really the only saving grace in a film marked by a number of bad directorial choices. Written as well as directed by Wenders, the movie has essentially no story: when Winter shows up at the townhouse occupied by his friend Freidrich, the director who summoned him is nowhere to be seen. The house happens to be occupied by a musical group that performs neo-folk music (knowing nothing about Portuguese music, I don’t know how else to describe it; a little like the Gypsy Kings, only a little more folky.)
Winter is the sole audience at their rehearsals and develops a crush on the pretty female singer. This tinge of romance — too minor in the scheme of things, because nothing happens as a result of it — seems utterly obvious, but the situation has a lot in common with the magical-seeming circus in “Wings of Desire,” a secret scene of uplifting artistry that seems too perfect to be real. It’s helpful to note that in the 80s and early 90s Wenders spent his time between films directing music videos, so by this point editing a sequence consisting of a whole musical number came naturally to him. The problem is that he gives us three or four entire songs, and the minutes-long sequences of Winter standing and listening with a serious face that lights up after the singer’s closeups is what passes in the film as a plot development.
The songs are pretty and take up time in the film, which is otherwise divided into two categories of scenes: Winter walks around Lisbon with a boom microphone recording ambient sounds; Winter hangs out with a group of neighbor children who are like filmmaking pixies — they have a couple of video cameras and constantly shoot tape of each other and Winter, until he finally gets grumpy and shoos them away. I guess these children are meant to provide a contrast to the blocked filmmaker whom Winter is pursuing; they shoot footage all the time.
Twenty minutes before the end of the film, Winter finally tracks down Friedrich, who has gone slightly mad. They argue about the meaning of their art and what possible good it does to make films. This discussion is actually the best-directed and meaningful part of the movie, but by the time you get to it, you won’t much care.
I spoke of bad decisions. The direction in the first half hour, which includes Winter’s journey and arrival in Lisbon, just isn’t good. Robby Müller did not work on this movie, and it shows. At times the framing is so bad that I wondered whether Müller was actually the reason that Wenders acquired his reputation in the first place. And the decision to make the group of children primary characters in so much of the movie is difficult to understand. Why not have the German meet his adult neighbors? It would have made for a much more interesting work. But Wenders had done this before, including in one of his lovely early movies, “Alice in the Cities” (1972), in which the same actor, Vogler, acquires a nine-year-old girl who is trying to find her mother’s house but doesn’t have the address. And in “Paris, Texas” there’s Travis’s son; together they search for his mother. For Wenders to use this device yet again, to buttress this movie’s thin structure, just feels like weakness.
Don’t Come Knocking (2005)
Jump back for a moment to “Paris, Texas.” The film was written by Sam Shepard and L.M. Kit Carson — the latter being an obscure writer and actor who was also the father of the movie’s child star. The two Carsons aren’t important, but in the 1970s and 80s, Sam Shepard was. To illustrate how important, here’s the first paragraph of his 2017 obituary by John Lahr in the New Yorker:
Sam Shepard arrived in New York in 1963, at the age of nineteen, and took the city by storm. He was funny, cool, detached. He found his groove early—a cowboy mouth with matinée-idol looks. Shepard, who died on Thursday [of ALS] at the age of seventy-three, had an outsider’s mojo and a cagey eye for the main chance. He quickly became part of that newest American class: the hipoisie. He wrote screenplays for Michelangelo Antonioni and songs with Patti Smith. He hung with Bob Dylan. To the downtown New York theatre scene, he brought news of the West, of myth and music. He didn’t conform to the manners of the day; he’d lived a life outside the classroom and conventional book-learning. He was rogue energy with rock riffs. In his coded stories of family abuse and addiction, he brought to the stage a different idiom and a druggy, surreal lens. He also had the pulse of youth culture. He understood the despair behind the protean transformations that the culture was undergoing—the mutations of psychic and physical shape that were necessary for Americans to survive the oppression of a nation at war, both at home and abroad. Martians, cowboys and Indians, and rock legends peopled Shepard’s fantasies. He put that rage and rebellion onstage.
Shepard was part of the new Hollywood of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Elliott Gould, Jon Voight, Donald Sutherland — the generation that stirred everything up in the first years of the 70s, before Lucas and Spielberg spun it all in a different direction. His near-debut in Days of Heaven (1970) (he had appeared first in a forgotten indie) struck the silver screen like a lightning bolt, his long neck and craggy features and affinity with horses giving him instant on-screen cred. But he wasn’t just an actor who famously had collaborations and affairs with Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith and then a series of actresses — he was also a famous playwright. In San Francisco he had a close association with the Magic Theater, which premiered many of his plays; in that city he was a demigod.
But in 2005 Shepard was 62 years old; in this film he looks at least ten years older than that. He is heavier, and his face has sunken into habitual expressions that express skepticism or even mild fear. In this film he plays a western movie star named Howard Spence who, twenty years in the past, shot a western in Butte, Montana. He leaves the Utah set of another film and travels to Butte (providing another excuse for Wenders to stage at least part of a road movie), and looks up first his mother and then the woman he had an affair with, back then. Suitably, she’s played by Jessica Lange, his glamorous movie-star lover of the 1980s. She’s only mildly surprised to see him; if she once waited for him to return to her, we can tell she’s given that up long since. But she points him to a young man singing country-rock songs in the bar where she works: this is their son, whom Howard has never met.
This sets up a classic “I’m your father” / “Where were you when I was growing up?” dynamic, which is fully and predictably played out. But that’s not all; there’s another child named Sky (Sarah Polley). At the beginning of this film, her mother has just died, so she spends most of the movie shadowing Howard while carrying around a blue vase containing the ashes and trying to introduce herself.
The character of Earl the angry son is overwritten, and Gabriel Mann, who plays him, is allowed to overact. His argument with the Jessica Lange character is so undisciplined that he frequently goes out of the camera frame — Wenders clearly lacked the ability to corral him, or maybe he felt that the overacting would be interpreted as the rebellious, uncontained spirit that also characterized his character's father, Howard. Earl is so thoroughly unpleasant a person, and what he says is so unsurprising, that the viewer has no sympathy for him. Polley is lovely but her character is underwritten; in a number of scenes where she’s just haunting Howard, she doesn’t have any lines. This is a shame because she’s clearly a much more talented actor than Mann. (She stopped acting in 2014 and became a director; her film “Women Talking” (2022) won her an Oscar for best adapted screenplay and a nomination for Best Picture.)
Remember that Shepard was a highly successful playwright. His script here has a fine cinematic opening, where Howard goes AWOL from the picture he’s shooting. But the deeper into the film we get, the stagier it becomes. The emotional conversation between Howard and Sky toward the end of the picture is even lit as if on a stage, as if Wenders and his crew decided to just give in to what the script really is in most of Act III. Where the film goes seriously wrong, however, is in the scenes between Howard and his mother. Both the script and the direction fail at this juncture. Her character (played by Eva-Marie Sainte, whose talent is wasted) shows little personality, says nothing unexpected, and the scenes are shot in a very uninspired way. The sequence is so dead that I suspect that, for reasons unknown, it was shot separately from most of the film.
In other parts of the movie, Wenders’ motion picture directing skill seems to return. The escape by Howard on horseback and the images of Butte are beautiful. If you’ve never been to Butte, it’s a bizarre-looking city. Ghosts of miners are everywhere, there’s a huge toxic pond2 abutting the center of town, and the architecture and light bring to mind the work of Edward Hopper.
Wenders, always fascinated with the strange aspects of the American landscape, captures a number of streetscapes, but I feel he could have done much more to use the strange appearance of the city to connect with the characters’ anxieties and alienation.
So it’s a mess, but that’s not even my main point. Recall the plot of “Paris, Texas” — a man reconnecting with the family he tore apart earlier. This movie is animated by exactly the same premise — and both were written by Sam Shepard. What makes “Paris, Texas” superior, for all its faults, is that at least the mise-en-scene is never constrained by stagey-ness; it’s a cinematic experience through and through.
All this is to justify my opinion that sentimentality, the loss of Robby Müller as a collaborator, and a simple loss of the touch that made his first films wonderful have led to the decline of Wenders as a director. I’m looking forward to seeing his current film, “Perfect Days,” which has garnered a certain degree of attention and praise. The synopses make it sound like it’s not without sentimentality, but I hope it has redeeming value.
This New York Times obituary of Robby Müller, who died in 2018, describes the peep show scene and how it was shot: paywall-free link