Winner of the 1984 Palm d'Or, Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas both estranges and persuades. Set against a tableau of Americana folklore, and saturated in Eggleston-esque colors–bright reds, pale blues, rusted yellows–the film's sublime and sometimes hyperrealist style is offset by an otherwise simple story. Written by Kit Carson and noted "no detours!" cowboy storyteller Sam Shepard, the film stars Harry Dean Stanton as Travis, who has been ambling lost for four years. Found by his brother (Dean Stockwell), Travis attempts to remedy his relationship with his son, Hunter, and make sense of the past with his estranged wife, Jane, played by the mesmerizing Nastassja Kinksi.

Criterion's packaging of this release includes an interview with Wenders in which the director characterizes his collaboration with Shepard as "alchemy." The idea that some illusionary might was at play coheres with the film's ethereal temper, largely realized by the obscure presence of foreign accents–German and French–and heightened by the cinematography of Robby Müller, who captures the vacant character of highway billboards, dirtied trucks, motel signs, and open road. In the film's final moments, as if passing some artificial, divine barrier, the landscape is photographed in the most unnatural, neon light. The urge to dress this simple fiction in striking images and synthetic colors, and to accompany it with Ry Cooder's cool and wickedly original score, confounds what could have been an overly-sentimental story. The film's basic architecture–a man apart–is heartbreaking in that we are offered glimpses of a very wanting Travis, his occasional smile boyish and nostalgic, who seems destined to go at it alone. The desert, where the movie begins–limitless and almost holy–captures Travis's grieving alienation. With only the memory of his once happier life, he wanders.

Paris, Texas is available this week on Criterion Blu-Ray and DVD.