Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-Language Road Movie Edited by Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt (review)

After Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli’s Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (London: Wallflower Press, 2006) comes Michael Gott and Thibaut Schilt’s collection of essays concentrating on the French-language road movie. Included are in-depth studies of well-known films (L’Emploi du temps, Western, Éloge de l’amour) and directors (Godard, the Dardennes brothers, Claire Denis), as well as emerging postcolonial voices that seek to problematize the rigidity of East–West, home–away, and France–Africa oppositions. Over the course of twelve chapters and eighteen films, travelling along the highways and byways of the Hexagon, via detours into North Africa and India, the collection exemplifies the current state of transnational Europe — a dynamic, circulatory system of flows and connections, set against the backdrop of migration and border crossing. For Gott and Schilt, there are two kinds of road movie: positive (the ‘open road’ of the title) and the negative (the ‘closed border’). The former are films that celebrate the freedom of the open road and its liberating, life-affirming potential; the latter focuses more on the debilitating implications of refugee and asylum-seeker status. Rascaroli’s lucid discussion of Loin, Depuis qu’Otar est parti…, and Welcome unpacks this dichotomy by emphasizing the importance of the ‘eve of the journey’ in these films rather than the journey itself: here, characters ‘are either held back or brood over the possibility of departing’ (p. 21). The usual suspects are then duly presented: Florian Grandena writes persuasively on how Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau’s Drôle de Félix (2000) — in many respects the genre’s urtext — is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on nomadism, and by the opposition between smooth and striated space, while Schilt’s own analysis of Western shines a light on the way the film manipulates traditional generic codes to promote a more positive model of integration into the French Republic. It is refreshing to see Benoît Jacquot earn some much-needed recognition: Glen W. Norton’s appraisal of À tout de suite and L’Intouchable explores Jacquot’s own approach to the road movie as a genre inflected by New Wave playfulness and postneorealist modernism. The inclusion of hitherto difficult-to-trace films — like Tariq Teguia’s Algerian civil war drama Rome plutôt que vous — and works that might not necessarily be described as road movies (La Promesse) also fit convincingly with the editors’ framework, either as examples of the internal borders running through Algerian society or as father–son narratives that critique human trafficking and the abuse of immigrants. Sylvie Blum-Reid looks at Tony Gatlif’s triptych Les Princes, Exils, and Liberté through the prism of music (flamenco, gypsy, Sufi trance) to argue that Gatlif’s itineraries offer audiences ‘a musical sense of the geography and of the path travelled towards self-transformation’ (p. 216). For Gatlif, cinema is travel. Ultimately, this is a welcome addition to a still-developing area. Gott and Schilt admit that there were many more films that they would like to have included; one can only hope that their suggested second volume sees the light of day.