Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-language Road Movie

Chapter 1

On the Eve of the Journey: Tangier, Tbilisi, Calais

Laura Rascaroli

Time and again in road movies the journey is represented as liberation—from a domesticity and a society that are perceived as suffocating, from persecution, poverty and war, or from personal and relational failures. The journey, in this sense, is a narrative device that channels the energies of both protagonist and film; the forward movement guarantees a release of tension, even though a precise destination often does not exist in road movies—thus accounting for the genre’s open-endedness and even penchant for tragic endings. The tension that finds relief through the journey is not only relevant to character psychology, but also to story, in terms of the film’s need to overcome a narrative obstruction, consisting in either inner or external obstacles, which hinder the departure. The energies thus released are at once emotional and aesthetic, inasmuch as the psychological alleviation experienced by the protagonist frequently merges with specific filmic pleasures enjoyed by the spectator. It is on the road that the distinct, kinetic energy and aesthetic dimension of the travel film become actualised.

Travel, of course, is not always synonymic with pleasure, but can run contrary to it. Displacement, exile, diaspora and unproductive or self-destructive wandering, for instance, all evoke a sense of displeasure and even of annihilation of the self, and are often connected to a lack of free agency. However, even when the journey is voluntary and yearned for by the traveller, tension may still be present and materialise in a pleasure/displeasure dynamic.

In contrast to the above-described mobilisation of narrative and concomitant release of tension, a number of French migration road movies of the past decade focus on states of strain and discomfort, for which little or no relief is found through motion. This effect is achieved by focussing on the eve of the journey rather than on the journey itself. In these films, the tension belongs, first of all, to the characters, to the extent that they are either held back or brood over the possibility of departing; however, it also has a much broader dimension that exceeds the personal sphere. The (planned, desired, delayed) journey becomes, indeed, the locus of the manifestation of tensions which characterise and affect life in contemporary French and European societies at large, and which have to do with pressures and strains created by factors such as border management, economic polarisation and political discourses on matters of migration, citizenship, mobility and identity.

The three examples of this trend that this essay will consider are Loin/Far (André Téchiné, 2001), Depuis qu’Otar est parti … /Since Otar Left (Julie Bertucelli, 2003) and Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009). While diverse in style and ambition, they share an interest in matters of legal and, especially, illegal immigration; and a hindered journey is at the core of their narrative and thematic concerns. In addition, they all fall in the category that Carrie Tarr has tentatively called ‘pre-border-crossing films’. According to Tarr, in these films the ‘mise-en-scène of destabilised, unsettling border spaces combined with a foregrounding of the migrant’s subjectivity and agency invite the western spectator to understand their choice of deterritorialisation and sympathise with their resulting vulnerability and isolation’ (Tarr 2007: 11). Similarly to Tarr, I here look at films that we can call ‘French’ while being conscious of the fact that ‘the transnational elements mobilised in films about migration call into question the validity of analysing border crossings within the limited framework of a national cinema, or even within the larger context of European cinema’ (Tarr 2007: 9). The first two of these films are international co-productions (between France and Spain and France and Belgium respectively). Loin was co-written by Téchiné with the Moroccan writer Faouzi Bensaïdi, ‘and is moreover quadrilingual, with dialogue in French, English, Spanish and Arabic, as well as a prayer in Hebrew’ (Marshall 2007: 115). Both other films also are multilingual: a French production, Welcome includes much dialogue in English, as well as some Kurdish and Turkish; in Depuis qu’Otar est parti … Georgian, French and Russian are spoken.

These films’ transnationalism is of course central to their redefinition of both immigrant and French identities, as well as of ideas of Eurocentrism. In her analysis of road movies produced in the 1990s and 2000s in Slovenia, Polona Petek has noted a tendency in recent European road movies to go in ‘the direction of immobility or, more accurately, the direction of stalled or refused mobility’ (Petek 2010: 219). Petek reads such tendency positively, with reference to the films’ constructive critique of both Eurocentrism and of the elitist western view of cosmopolitanism as coinciding with capitalism, which they replace with the project of an alternative, non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. In particular, for Petek these films’ choice to support the ‘interweaving of pro-European and yugonostalgic discourses, grounded on both sides of the European border, instantiates or, at least, paves the way for such a multi-sited cosmopolitanism’ (222). In the French pre-border-crossing films I explore here, instead, while the stalling of movement certainly amounts to a critique of Eurocentrism, it does not result in a clear alternative cosmopolitan project, but becomes the expression of profound social tensions.

In my essay, I will reflect on the centrality (or, indeed, marginality) of France to these films. Each is set in a location that can be described, in terms of global geopolitics, as peripheral with reference to both France and Western Europe: in Tangier, Tbilisi and Calais respectively. By talking from the margins, each of these films reconfigures the continent and the place that France thinks itself to occupy in it. As well as examining tension from the point of view of character psychology and of the films’ broad thematic concerns, I will also discuss it in narratological terms—and show how, rather than the open-endedness of the typical road movie narrative, these films are characterised by stasis, circularity and repetition, in a way that simultaneously compounds the characters’ feelings of entrapment and contributes to the idea of a socio-cultural tension that cannot find release in the transformative experience of the journey.

South/North, East/West

The globalising discourses that became predominant in the 1980s and 1990s posited what was substantially to become a borderless world: ‘Faced with the onslaught of cyber and satellite technology, as well as the free unimpeded flow of global capital, borders would—so the globalization purists argued—gradually open until they disappeared altogether’ (Newman 2006: 172). The past decade, possibly as a reaction to these discourses, has seen an interdisciplinary renaissance of border studies; similarly, these three films, which span the whole decade, decidedly reiterate the importance of barriers—physical, social, legal, economic—and engage with the border as a process rather than as a static notion. Borders pertain, of course, to the sphere of power, and power relations are a main factor in border demarcations (Newman 2006: 175), as well as in the exercise of the control and restriction of movement. The differential power that becomes evident around borders is one of the sources of the tension that emerges in the chosen films.

Mindful of the fact that borders are not limited to the actual line of demarcation between two countries, Klaus Eder has suggested that distinctions must be drawn between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ borders. Hard borders function not only on the basis of actual barriers but also on the existence of soft boundaries that have to do with the production of meaning:

The difference between both is that the former, the hard borders, are institutionalized borders, written down in legal texts. The soft borders of Europe are encoded in other types of texts indicating a pre-institutional social reality, the reality of images of what Europe is and who are Europeans and who are not.

(Eder 2006: 256)

The films I here consider represent both hard and soft borders and, arguably, participate in the shaping of the latter, for they produce images of what Europe is and is not. The visibility of a film such as Welcome in French and European political discourses on immigration corroborates this statement: the film was screened in both the French and the European parliaments and on 2 March 2009 the director Lioret debated the issue of French legislation on illegal immigrants with Éric Besson, Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Mutually-Supportive Development in the government of François Fillon, on the France 3 programme Ce soir (ou jamais!).

The three films comment on the two main frontiers of Europe—southern and eastern; and each does so while placing France (which is evoked either directly or via its conspicuous absence) at the centre of a reconfiguration of the continent. The films, furthermore, frame France from the north, south and east respectively, thus looking at its three most important hard borders.

More specifically, Welcome, which takes place in Calais and is narratively projected towards England, is set against the backdrop of concepts of the South/North divide, one which overturns the original idea of European civilisation as constructed from the south and the Mediterranean. Today, the prevalent discourse sees the North as a civilising force set in contrast to the ‘problem’ of a South depicted as inexorably lagging behind in the modernisation process. In Welcome, it is northern Europe, namely England, that attracts immigration, and not France, which is perceived as a border itself—as the southern frontier of the civilised North.

Loin also looks at the South/North divide, and in particular at the southern border of Europe, from the distinctive point of view of Arabic North Africa. As Eder reminds us, this area, in contrast to Black Africa, could potentially be considered European, since ‘[i]t could claim a long common tradition of being part of the Roman Empire, of an intellectual common ground over centuries of the Christian-Islamic culture up to the colonization of North Africa by the French’ (Eder 2006: 263). Yet, this border remains fixed, and the southern frontier of Europe has now moved to the southeast, coinciding with Turkey. In Loin also France is no longer central to the emigrants’ dreams and is indeed practically irrelevant to the narrative. A French truck driver travels the Spain/Morocco commercial route in search of adventure; of his Moroccan friends, one dreams of Spain and a generic Europe, while the other considers immigrating to Canada. France is thus drastically repositioned, albeit in a world that is still conditioned by the visible inheritance of French colonisation.

Finally, Depuis qu’Otar est parti … focuses on the East/West boundary.

The East provides the second frontier of Europe. In the narrations of this frontier, the ‘second other’ of Europe was constructed. This East appears as Russia, providing a referent for something that Europe is different from. From Tsarist Russia to Communist Russia, a particular sense of threat was imagined. The East is the space from once [sic] the ‘Mongols’ came, then the ‘Russians’ and finally the ‘Soviet Communists’.

(Eder 2006: 264)

This is the only film in which France is still regarded a utopian destination by the characters; seen from beyond the post-Soviet eastern border, thus, France is still equivalent with old Europe. The film, however, shows how the repositioning of the West/East border after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc is challenging the idea of what being European means. In Georgia, a country wedged between Russia and Turkey, we get acquainted with characters who not only speak French, but also feel French. In spite of its spiritual proximity with Paris, though, post-communist Georgia is as distant from France as it was in the past, if not more.

Indeed, what we are given to see in each of these films is far from the idealised borderless Europe of free movement. On the other hand, the question of how to cross borders constitutes an almost insurmountable problem for all non-western characters. Europe looks very much like a fortress here—though its borders are not completely impermeable. What is especially significant is the way in which these films challenge Eurocentrism, and consequently the idea of France’s hegemonic position within Europe; in fact, they reposition the country as a sort of borderland. Even when it is the chosen destination for emigration, its harsh reality clashes so profoundly with the characters’ dreams that it compellingly suggests the end of France’s centrality to an idea of Europe based on the inheritance of the Enlightenment and on discourses that equate modernity with progress and liberal capitalism with