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 osmopolitanism. 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...