Date: Wednesday 13 November 2024 at 6pm and 9pm at the Guerrieri cinema in Matera the film “Paris, Texas” is scheduled for the Cinergia “Il Cineclub” series. Single seat 5 euros.
Travis is found by his brother Walt after a long absence and brought back to Los Angeles. Here he sees his son Alex who lives with his aunt and uncle after his parents separated. Initially the two struggle to communicate but then the situation changes to the point of deciding to go together to look for his mother and wife Jane in Houston. There Travis will discover that the woman works in a peep show. The meeting between Wim Wenders and Sam Shepard, screenwriter and actor, allows the director to find the opportunity to deal with two elements that are important to him. On the one hand it offers him the opportunity to shoot a film in the USA free from the pressures that had been imposed on him for “Hammett” and on the other it allows him to further explore the theme of travel understood as a search for oneself. The American on the road is reread, and to some extent surpassed, from the first shot (from an anthology of auteur cinema) in which we come to know the protagonist as a man who travels almost without a specific destination across a stony and arid expanse . The same title combines and at the same time separates with a comma the name of a large European capital (identified in a town in the States where Travis purchased land by correspondence) and one of the states with which cinema has identified the USA: Texas . Wenders then takes a further step which proves to be decisive for his conception of cinema. As he himself declared: “All my previous films actually didn’t believe in the story, in the plot: they were based exclusively on the characters and the various situations in which they found themselves (…) This time, despite the ending being completely ‘open’, the plot has a precise direction from the first moment.” Wenders tells a story of love (paternal, filial, marital) with all their difficulties, with glass separating individuals but also with a strong desire to find each other again. To then perhaps resume an internal journey that others do not have access to. Robby Müller’s photography and Ry Cooder’s tormented guitar contributed significantly to the success of the film which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
