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The title evokes Lubitsch's joke about "Paris, Paramount," a different German here gives the West a go. The opening feint is on Stroheim's Greed, the dot in the desert is Harry Dean Stanton in dark suit and red cap, mute and dusty "like forty miles of rough road" under an eagle's eye. (Bernhard Wicki as the oddly sinister doctor who examines him is another red herring, wrapping Texas colloquialisms in a Teutonic accent.) "What's out there?" The feeling of monumental portent turns out to be setup for a modest familial reunion, the vanished man has a brother (Dean Stockwell) who pastes billboards across Los Angeles and a sister-in-law (Aurore Clément) who's practically adopted his estranged son (Hunter Carson). The missing piece is the wife (Nastassja Kinski), an apparition in flickering Super 8 projections and a scarlet Chevy in the concrete swirls of Houston highways. (A composition of glass tower, blasting sun, helicopter and construction crane tilts down to give the boy's view of the familiar head of blonde hair just out of reach.) The peepshow club at the end of the road, "not a place to bring a fancy woman." A parched Wim Wenders tour, the case of the maker of brilliant European films who yearns desperately to make overblown American films instead. Green gas-station neon against purple sunsets, a blaring train glimpsed through a motel room's open door, boots lined up as a jet takes off over them—the stranded poet's postcards, given the glow of Robby Müller's camera and the moan of Ry Cooder's slide guitar. A child's explanation of the Big Bang and a vagabond's prophecy of the apocalypse, "somewhere without language or streets." Antonioni's Il Grido is the mainstay until Stanton's soulful cragginess comes to resemble Bogart's, suddenly his meeting with Kinski through a one-way mirror is transformed from a Sam Shepard playlet into a séance for Ray's In a Lonely Place. Philip Guston's Driver for the coda, the Wenders horizon unmistakable in any continent.
--- Fernando F. Croce |