French-language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration, and ‘New Europe’ by Michael Gott (review)

Reviews 217 femmes is the mise en abyme of documentary film characteristics. While Pierre and Manon are filming and compiling a documentary on Henri, the resistance fighter, Garrel is filming and creating a documentary on the lives of Pierre and Manon, the seemingly love-struck couple. The film takes on many characteristics of a documentary itself. One of the most notable similarities is the lack of music, either in the background or in the diegetic reality of the film. The only sounds the spectator hears throughout the majority of the film is from the characters, such as crinkling of paper, and the rustling of clothes as people walk. The cars driving past in the background even create a sharp contrast to the heavy weight of silence in the film. L’ombre des femmes is an intriguing film, as it closely follows the rise, inevitable demise, and surprising reconstruction of a relationship. Despite the occasional slow progress of the storyline, the black-and-white throwback to a previous era, and the aggressive nature of Pierre, the film is a faithful retelling of “happily ever after.” New Manchester High School (GA) Ann Marie Moore Gott, Michael. French-language Road Cinema: Borders, Diasporas, Migration, and ‘New Europe’. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016. ISBN 978-0-7486-9867-7. Pp. 208. $105. Part of the series“Traditions in World Cinema,”this monograph devotes original analysis to currently popular and previously under-examined areas in transnational French-language European road cinema, principally films from or co-produced by France, Belgium, and Switzerland from the 1960s to the present. It engages the reader by anchoring case studies in contemporary knowledge and published pieces which the author either embraces or clearly refutes. In fact, Gott’s strong authorial voice is one of the book’s principal strengths. Convincing in his argument, Gott sets his perspective against theory and recent explorations of the category of “road movie” and its many subcategories such as automobile road, post-voyage (161), return films (54), and walking road films (73). Consistent in their approach, his analyses firstly address brief scenario descriptions so as not to alienate those not yet familiar with the films and, secondly, flush out key vocabulary and definitions/characteristics typically underexplored as separate subcategories. Thematic in its format, French-language Road Cinema includes a theoretical introduction and five chapters interlinking European, Swiss, Belgian, French, Italian, and American road movie traditions, truly one of the book’s strengths. Of special interest is the inquiry into the road movie as a“particularly American genre” and the extent to which the European and American road movies function “as part of a continuum of shared inspiration” (15). In some respects, the book complements Blum-Reid’s Traveling in French Cinema (Palgrave, 2016, FR 90.2), as it is relatively similar in format and mission to investigate narrative trends in the road movie such as diaspora, ritual, nomadic travel, return, and migrant stories. In others, it comes close to Corinne Maury and Philippe Ragel’s Filmer les frontières (PU de Vincennes, 2015) in that it explores French-speaking directors affiliated with France (Akerman, Godard, Egoyan, Sylvain George, Till Roeskens). Early on, the author distinguishes his scope and trajectory from other recent studies on the topic, especially from Archer’s The French Road Movie: Space, Mobility, Identity (Berghahn, 2013, FR 87.2), which focuses greatly on film aesthetics of the genre, and Gott and Schilt’s edited volume, Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-language Road Movie (Intellect, 2013, FR 88.3)—one of the first collections to take on the contemporary French-language road movie and filmic questioning of France’s national identity. The variety of films in case-study format embedded in thematic chapters results in a series of short yet poignant pieces continually in larger conversation with public space, identity and mobility studies, and even cartography and cultural geography. Each case study simultaneously researches the usage of both techniques (the travelling shot, close-ups, for example) and distinctions in modes of transportation (car, foot, train, borrowed transportation, motorbike). In this respect, Gott’s section on rail travel in La vraie vie est ailleurs (Choffat, 2006) is just one case which demonstrates...