Paris, Texas/Happy Together
love in Wim Wenders and Wong Kar-wai
The slow but powerful guitar plays in my ears as remnant of the film Paris, Texas. I ask: Why does love carry such strange power? Over beauty, justice, freedom, good, compassion, and all other virtues, love seems to be transcendental, the most powerful, yet the utterly unknowable force. How is it that the seven year old child in the film tells his father, who has returned after four years of radio silence, that he felt the latter’s presence all throughout, that he never believed the father was dead? How does the child recognise his similarly lost mother from a glimpse of her hair? How does the man, finding his wife after four years, does not as much touch her, but is content to confess his eternal love for her, leaving her with the child? Wenders said at a recent talk, “sometimes leaving is an act of loving.”
To wrench out some understanding of this force called love, we make art. Through the sculpture of Psyche and Cupid in the Louvre to the stone carvings of Khajurao, the verses of Khusrau to the sonnets of Shakespeare, and films such as Paris, Texas. Here, love emerges as a drugged state of being. The humming guitar lulls the audience into a trance with the camera showing long shots of the Mojave Desert and Travis, the protagonist, lost, searching for water. He refuses to speak for a significant part of the first half—he is simply moved about by others and every now and then he runs away to nowhere. Much happens in-between, and towards the end of the film, we return to the same hypnotic frame, this time at the call booth where Jane, Travis’s wife, works.
Travis and Jane are separated by a glass-mirror which allows only one of them to see the other person at any given time. They communicate with each other through a telephone. Travis turns his face away from the glass, refusing to see Jane when she cannot see him. He narrates their life story to tell Jane that he is Travis, her long-lost husband. We see Jane cry. In her silent crying, we see love’s fundamental element: pain. Nastassja Kinski, who plays Jane, enjoys very little screen time in the film, but she makes each moment count. Her slow, smooth movements, her beautiful face, her crossed legs, poised posture, bent head, all embody—literally—her deep seated pain. In what may be called the climatic scene of the film, she speaks of her pain—of imagining conversations with Travis and feeling his acute presence long after she left him. And then, nothing. Nothing except a vast emptiness she refused to let her child fill. An emptiness she carried to this moment, occupied fleetingly by the passing of time, but never filled.
This moment too refuses fulfilment through their impenetrable separation. Love is instead animated in the repetition of the room number where their son is waiting for her. The son loves them both, ties them together, merges them into one; but he cannot have them both at once. She meets her son, hugging him in an act of a most innocent intimacy. He leaves. The neon lights of the city, the deep darkness of the Mojave desert, and the slumber of the base guitar all consume him. In this trance, love lies intoxicated.
I finish watching Wong Kar-wai’s beautiful queer romance, Happy Together (1997). I receive a message from a friend speaking about his desire for a person he has never met. The agony of eros. The uncertainty of love. It does not come with a warranty policy. The arranged marriage industry and its morphed form, the modern dating app industry have tried, using indices of predictability from caste to height. Yet, when true love strikes, it does so unannounced. You might not even have met the person, heard their voice, felt their breath, and yet, they can consume you. To the point of delirium.
In the film, Fai (played by Tony Leung) is in constant delirium. He is lost in a foreign country with his beloved, who keeps coming and going, unannounced. His lover is inconstant, unfaithful, fleeting. Fai revels in the yellow lamp light of his small room, much like I revel in the shadow of the window in mine. He dreams of the waterfall they had both come to visit but failed to. When his lover arrives injured, he tends to him, cleaning his wounds, cooking for him, putting up with his outbursts, scheming to prevent him for leaving. He leaves. Fai lets him leave. He himself leaves, finds the falls alone, returns home.
This summary does no justice, if such a thing is possible, to the film’s tenderness. Wong Kar-wai has a way with crevices and repetition. Much like the damned alleyway in In the Mood for Love, here, the street corner where Fai works occurs repeatedly. At night. Deserted. Longing. The score repeats in the background, Fai sits alone, not knowing what he wants. When Fai visits the falls, he stands in the heavy mist and rain, wondering at the strangeness of standing there alone. He sits in his chair at home, staring into nothingness, or puts his head down on the edge of the boat, perhaps asking the waters to give him rest.
But can one stop love? You may resist it all you like, deceive your heart, use your intelligent head to play games with yourself and the world, but when it comes, all crumbles. Perhaps this is why Wong Kar-wai chose the waterfall for him film. Love is like the waterfall. Inexorable. All consuming. We mere mortals stand no chance. Why do we try then? It is far more blissful to give in, to let it consume it, to confess—more to our own selves than to those we love.
