In his New York Times
review of Emanuelle Bercot’s latest film, Elle s’en va – On My Way, Stephen
Holden describes it as a road movie. This particular film genre is not as
pervasive in France as it is in films from the US. But what constitutes a
road movie? Is it primarily a male-defined genre or can we identify a
feminine approach to this type of film.
In the road movie, the main character or characters leave
their home and travel other places. From an historical point of view, we
can trace the narrative’s roots back to Ancient Greek epics such as The Odyssey or Ancient Mesopotamian
sagas like The Epic of Gilgamesh,
where an initial fight between the two main characters – Gilgamesh and Enkidu –
is followed by their grand journey to Cedar Mountain where they destroy the
mountain’s monstrous guardian.
They also kill the Bull of Heaven,
which brings the wrath of the gods upon them. Enikidu is sentenced to death. Distraught at the loss of his friend, Gilgamesh sets out on
a long and dangerous journey in search of eternal life. Some cineastes –
notably German director Wim Wenders - will say that the origin of this desire
to roam lies even deeper into history, in our nomadic prehistoric roots, “in [our]
primal need to leave an account of [our] passage on earth.” (New York Times, Nov 11, 2007).
As far as cinematic history is concerned, we can find examples
of the road movie even in early Hollywood films. Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, for example, is a character that is
always on the road. The genre
really blossomed, however, after the Second World War with the increasing
presence and use of the automobile. In the 1960s, the road film really gained recognition with
such epics as Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
and Easy Rider (1969).
The road movie in France also began to flourish in the late
1960s and 1970s – Gérard Oury’s Le
Corniaud (1965), Jean-Luc Godard’s Le
Weekend (1967), Bertand Bliers Les
Valseuses (1974).
More
recently, we have seen other examples:
Western (1997) by
Manuel Poirier - a Spanish shoe company representative and a Russian hitchhiker
track down love as they wander and hitchhike through Brittany.
Time Out (2001) by
Laurent Canet - a 50-year-old executive is laid off, but rather than tell his
family, he pretends to go to work but in reality passes the time driving the
highways of France and Switzerland, reading the paper, or sleeping in his car.
The Grocer’s Son (2007)
by Eric Guirado sees an estranged son return home from Lyon to his family’s
home in the Drôme countryside and help out by driving the family’s grocer’s van
from village to village.
Voir la mer (2011) – Two brothers drive their motor
home from Burgundy to Saint-Jean de Luz in the Basque country but they come
across an attractive young woman who has never seen the sea so together they
head for the Basque coast.
The road movie genre is often characterized as a means of creating
narratives that explore space and mobility, cross boundaries, and lead to
escape from a stifling society and a mise-en-question
of location and identity. In the hands of male directors, the genre is more
often than not a romantic escapism where the automobile or motorbike allows the
male protagonist to shake off the shackles of responsibility: job, home,
marriage. By contrast, however,
given that women have usually played roles within the home or in a space
strongly connected with the private/domestic world the very presence of a woman
or a couple of women alone on the road is a paradoxical insubordination to the
status quo. Among the first
woman-directed road movies was Chantal Ackerman’s Les rendez-vous d’Anna
(1978), but perhaps the best known road saga directed by a woman is Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond) (1985)
directed by Agnès Varda and recently restored and re-released in cinemas in
France. It tells the story from
the end back to the beginning of a young woman who takes to the road and ends
up frozen to death in a ditch. We
follow the police investigation and discover in reverse order the events that
led to her wretched demise.
Ten years later, Yolande Moreau – a Belgian actress and comedian
- made her début in film-making alongside Gilles Porte with a road picture of
her own: Quand la mer monte (When the Sea
Rises) (2006). She plays the
role of Irène. She is touring
northern France with her one-woman show, where a stout, loud, and somewhat
unattractive woman wearing a clownish mask comically confesses to the audience
that she has murdered her husband. At each performance, she randomly selects a
man from the crowd and makes him both lover and accomplice to a robbery she is
planning. Having broken down one day on the road, she is helped by Dries (Wim
Willaert) who was passing on his moped.
As a way of thanking him for his help she offers him two tickets to the
show. He comes with one of his
mates, and she spots him in the audience during her performance. She chooses him as her
"chicken" for that show.
Later, she goes out with Dries and his friends for a
drink. They all hit it off quite
well, but the next night, to Irène’s surprise, Dries shows up again for the show
but gets thrown out of the theatre for berating some audience members who
arrived late. Even though she is
angry with him, she sees him after the performance and slowly their
relationship evolves as she is drawn into the mesh of Dries’ life. She sadly sees him lose his job
unloading and stacking vegetables on the open-air market, but then happily she
gets to know him as one of the operators of Totor, his town’s famous giant
puppet, who only comes out for the town’s festivities. The carnival atmosphere that surrounds
the parading of the giant puppets contrasts with Irène’s holding on to the
domestic side of her life through her regular evening phone calls to her
husband, where they discuss the tiles they should choose for their kitchen and
how things are going at his work.
Emmanuelle Bercot’s road movie also combines a feeling of
escape from the domestic humdrum with a renewal, retrieval, rediscovery, or maybe
a reinvigoration of family life? With Catherine Deneuve in the central role,
the film explores domestic relationships, a particular genre of cinema (the road movie), whilst
also engaging in a contemplation of life lived both on screen and in reality as
Mick Lasalle of the San Francisco Chronicle proposes in his review of the film.
