CHAPTER 14

On the Eve of the Journey: The New European

Road Movie

Laura Rascaroli

Definitions

Transnational
Extending beyond the national borders of a single country. This idea has
emerged in recent decades in describing how international economic and social
forces make their presence felt across borders. It may be linked with discussions
of postnationalism, postcolonialism and globalisation, and how these affect the
production of film and its representations. Considering the transnational means
interrogating ideas of the global and local, interfaces between national and
international, and the idea of ‘national cinema’.

Eurocentrism
A worldview which centres Europe as the source of ‘civilisation’ and progress,
and frames other cultures and geographic locations as subordinate to its
cultural and material power. Eurocentric views may seek to justify European
colonialism and other imperialism and to denigrate non-European artistic and

Laura Rascaroli, On the Eve of the Journey: Tangier, Tbilisi, Calais, published in: Michael
Gott and Thibaut Schilt eds., Open Roads, Closed Borders: The Contemporary French-
Language Road Movie, 2013, Intellect, reproduced with permission of Intellect.

L. Rascaroli (*)
Film and Screen Media Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 249

I. Lewis, L. Canning (eds.), European Cinema in the Twenty-First
Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33436-9_14
250  L. RASCAROLI

intellectual achievements. Both academia and film culture have been considered
to be overtly and problematically Eurocentric in defining film canons and in
their interpretation of non-Western film work.

Deterritorialisation
A concept originated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1972 book
Anti-Oedipus. Once a psychoanalytic term referring to the fluidity and dis-
placement of human subjectivity in contemporary capitalist societies, it has
been adapted to describe how globalised modernity ‘dislocates’ people both
physically and in their sense of identity. It can also describe how migration and
the mediatisation of society may simultaneously distance people from their
geographic origins and intensify engagement with their originating culture.

Introduction
Time and again, in road movies the journey is represented as liberation—from
a domesticity and 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 psychol-
ogy, 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, inas-
much 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 synonymous with pleasure, but can run con-
trary to it. Displacement, exile, diaspora and unproductive or self-destructive
wandering, for instance, all evoke a sense of displeasure and even of annihila-
tion 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
mobilisation of narrative and release of tension described above, 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 focusing 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; how-
ever, it also has a much broader dimension that exceeds the personal sphere.
The (planned, desired, delayed) journey becomes, indeed, the locus of the
 14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE  251

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 polarisa-
tion and political discourses on matters of migration, citizenship, mobility and
identity.
The three examples of this trend that this chapter considers are Far (2001),
Since Otar Left (2003) and—in a more detailed case study—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 deterritoriali-
sation 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). Far 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 Since Otar Left Georgian, French and Russian
are spoken. These films’ transnationalism is of course central to their redefini-
tion 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 this 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 cosmopolitan-
ism. 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.
This chapter reflects 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
252  L. RASCAROLI

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 European 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 also dis-
cuss it in narratological terms—and show how, rather than the open-endedness
of the typical road movie narrative, these films are characterised by stasis, circu-
larity and repetition, in a way that simultaneously compounds the characters’
feelings of entrapment and contributes to the idea of a sociocultural tension
that cannot find release in the transformative experience of the journey.

Borders and Borderlands
Because of the statement that the three films make through their choice of
marginalising France, it seems productive to pay some attention to how they
engage with actual margins. By the term ‘borderlands’ I here intend spaces that
are constructed as limens and frontiers and that function as representations of
soft borders and, indirectly, of ideas of France and Europe according to the
discursive axes South/North and East/West. It is not necessary for a film to
include images of a border in order to evoke it. Equally, crossing a border does
not necessarily imply the physical act of traversing the line of demarcation
between two countries:

For many travellers, the border crossing point is located at the check-in counters
at the airports in their home countries. It may be the airline officials who under-
take the task or, as is increasingly the case in Canada and some other western
countries, the creation of a micro piece of ex-territory under US jurisdiction in
the foreign airport territory. (Newman 2006: 178)

Similarly, micro-pieces of another country may be found in large ports, as in

Far, which foregrounds ports as borderlands and sets significant sections of its
narrative in the ports of Algeciras, the largest Spanish city on the Bay of
Gibraltar, and especially of Tangier, Morocco, situated at the western entrance
to the Strait. The entire city of Tangier can be seen as a borderland, as remarked
by André Téchiné himself when he said that Tangier is one of those “frontier-­
spaces, places that are both bridges and barriers, places of transit” (quoted in
Marshall 2007: 118).
Serge (Stéphane Rideau), a young French truck driver, can cross over legally,
though not without delays, given the controls implemented in order to police
the trafficking of both drugs and people between northern Africa and southern
Europe. His friend Saïd (Mohamed Hamaidi), instead, is one of the many
Moroccans who converge on Tangier and hang around the port—the film’s
true borderland—waiting for an opportunity to hide under a lorry and cross
over to Spain. Here, in spite of the incessant transcontinental circulation of
goods, the demarcation between two sides, and indeed two worlds—North
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and South, neoliberal Europe and developing Africa, First and Third World,
Schengen and non-EU, former coloniser and ex-colonies—becomes most evi-
dent. As Étienne Balibar has noted, “globalization tends to knock down fron-
tiers with respect to goods and capital while at the same time erecting a whole
system of barriers against the influx of a workforce and the ‘right to flight’ that
migrants exercise in the face of misery, war, and dictatorial regimes in their
countries of origin” (Balibar 2003: 37). Arguably, the port is at once a small-­
scale version of the global melting pot, a microcosmic rendition of the tensions
between the north and the south of the world, and a representation of the
conflict between two competing forms of power: the state and organised
crime. The question of where power and rights reside, however, is profoundly
problematised in this borderland: far from being organised according to a
clear-cut, binary model of spatial division (here/there, Europe/Africa, legal/
illegal), the port is a hybrid space—neither fully Moroccan, nor fully European—
in which different logics and laws meet, clash and coexist, and in which borders
can be negotiated in various ways.
Vehicles are prominent in Far, including bikes, scooters, old cars, and
Serge’s lorry. It is appropriate to ‘read’ these vehicles in terms of the characters’
dissimilar levels of mobility and freedom; in particular, we may consider Serge’s
lorry as another instance of the presence of the borderland in Far. Described
with some pride to a deeply impressed Saïd, Serge’s new French-registered
truck—a Swedish-made Scania—is evidently framed as state-of-the-art north-
ern European machinery, as well as an actualisation of the Western world’s
ability to translate its aggressive neoliberal credo into advanced technology and
unstoppable mobility. Indeed, the lorry puts together scientific innovation and
commercial dynamism, thus confirming Europe’s traditional force of penetra-
tion into less industrialised regions. It is surely not by chance that the lorry
bears on its sides, in huge block letters, the words Plateforme européenne: a
signifier of both Europe and France, Serge’s truck gestures towards old
Europe’s continued success at colonising faraway lands for commercial pur-
poses. It is of some import, indeed, that a young Frenchman has access to the
latest European technology, while the Moroccan man drives a battered bike, a
piece of colonial import that testifies to the first world’s smart industrial pene-
tration into the third.
The truck may be seen as a borderland, in the sense of a mobile micro-piece
of France within Morocco. Yet, in spite of its display of technology and power,
the vehicle literally goes à la dérive, astray, on account of the directionless
Serge’s existential crisis. This may be at the root of his mysteriously motivated
decision to start smuggling drugs into Europe on his lorry. Although he finally
realises the magnitude of what he has embarked on, Serge is left with no choice
but to drive to a rendezvous, at which an armed man takes his truck away with-
out a word. For one night, stuck in the middle of nowhere, Serge is dispos-
sessed of his European rights and of his shell of security and protected mobility.
While his lorry is returned to him, it is no longer his, for it has been tampered
with and is now the carrier of the goods of his new ‘employers’. Serge’s last act,
254  L. RASCAROLI

as he leaves Morocco, is to hide Saïd on his truck and grant him a passage to
Spain—in spite of having frequently told him in the past that “leaving is not a
solution”, and that he should stop dreaming of Europe, which is “all a pipe
dream”. The film’s final shot is of the boat leaving the port; the abrupt ending
of the extra-diegetic music, which “cuts off the final image” (Marshall 2007:
120), serves to highlight that this is only the beginning of Saïd’s journey into
the unknown.

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—gradu-
ally 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 demar-
cation 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 institution-
alized 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 here represent both hard and soft borders and, arguably, partici-
pate 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 March 2nd 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!).
 14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE  255

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 con-
structed 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.
Far 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
Far, too, 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 immigrat-
ing to Canada. France is thus drastically repositioned, albeit in a world that is
still conditioned by the visible inheritance of French colonisation.
Finally, Since Otar Left … focuses on the East/West boundary.

The East provides the second frontier of Europe. In the narrations of this fron-
tier, 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)

Bertuccelli’s film arguably proposes the whole of the Caucasian independent

state of Georgia as a borderland. Located at the crossroads of Eastern Europe
and western Asia, independent from Russia since 1991, Georgia is a member of
the Council of Europe and aspires to join the EU. Set mainly in the capital city,
Tbilisi, and in its last section in Paris, it is the least dynamic of the three films,
even though its narrative focuses on two journeys of immigration to France:
the first, in fact, takes place before the start of the narrative, while the second
begins at its end.
256  L. RASCAROLI

The country is represented in the film as physically and metaphorically

wedged between East and West, and more precisely between Russia and
Europe—or, better, France. Emma Wilson has suggested that the film looks “at
subjective journeys, at fantasies of France and of Georgia” (Wilson 2009: 90);
indeed, the three main characters, who represent three generations of women—
grandmother Eka (Esther Gorintin), her daughter Marina (Nino
Khomassouridze) and her granddaughter Ada (Dinara Droukarova)—are
keenly involved in the production of personal and family narratives involving
both Russia and France. Ideas of Paris and France are evoked throughout the
film, as the women frequently speak about Eka’s beloved son, Otar, who, in
spite of holding a medical degree, emigrated to Paris two years before.
Furthermore, their house is full of the classics of French literature, which Eka’s
husband had shipped directly from France, and carefully hid from the
Bolsheviks.
Russia is evoked both by Eka’s Soviet cult of French culture and by the post-­
Soviet environs of Tbilisi, including the drab block where Marina’s lover lives,
the post office, “a sullen relic of the Soviet era” (Graffy 2004: 69), the porce-
lain factory where Ada finds some work as an interpreter, and the impersonal
offices where Marina and Ada discover the circumstances of Otar’s tragic death,
following a fall in the building site where he was working. While Georgia’s
infrastructure (light, water, telephone, roads, public transport, postal service)
is presented as severely deficient, both as an inheritance of the Soviet era and
for the inefficiency of the new government (Marina comments regarding civil
servants that “ever since independence, they are just as stupid”), Eka is ready
to declare herself a Stalinist, “if being a Stalinist means being honest, patriotic
and altruistic”.
The main fantasy created by the women is that of Otar’s continued existence
in Paris after his death. Marina wishes to spare her mother the truth, and Ada,
first reluctantly, then with some gusto, begins to draft letters that she reads to
Eka, as if they came from Otar. In them, Otar’s life in Paris is embellished even
more than in his own letters, which he wrote for his old mother’s benefit. It is
understandable why the film evokes so complex an account of personal, familial
and national identities: after the end of the Soviet rule, the country found itself
in the position of having to create its own identity, somewhere in between
post-Soviet reality, pre-Soviet ideas of Georgian culture, a range of ethnic and
religious communities and the pull of market economy (see Gachechiladze
1995). Georgia’s actual geographical, cultural, economic and social in-­
betweenness is further intensified in the film by the three women’s dreaming of
France. Tbilisi is constructed as a hybrid space, located between Asia, Eastern
Europe and Western Europe—as well as past and future, and myth and reality.
However, the pull of Western Europe on Bertucelli’s characters is no less than
ruinous, both for individual Georgians and for their country.
Otar decided to leave both Georgia and the medical profession and emigrate
to Paris; the difficulty of doing so is demonstrated via the character of Ada’s
occasional boyfriend, who is constantly planning to go west, but who, after his
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latest failed attempt, returns home admitting that “the Turkish customs offi-
cers are bastards”. Otar never appears on screen; yet, the film is able to convey
something of the experience of the non-EU immigrant worker in contempo-
rary Paris. It is most significant that Otar is only ever seen in photographs and
that when he phones we do not hear his voice (nor we hear it when his letters
are read out, usually by Ada). Otar’s absence suggests that, as sans-papiers (an
immigrant with no valid documentation), he has become an expendable ‘inex-
istent nonperson’, to use Balibar’s expression. This is confirmed by the details
of his death: the builder denies ever having hired him, and he is buried in a
pauper’s grave. The women decide to ignore this reality; the fake letters they
write intimate Otar’s participation in a social and cultural life from which he
was entirely excluded. In a faked photomontage, Otar stands outside the
Moulin Rouge, simultaneously a signifier of the mythical turn-of-the-century
France and the economic and cultural exuberance of the Belle Époque; a most
typical tourist landmark, and the home of the seductive cancan. The chosen
setting suggests that the women imagine him living within the old cultural
framework with which they identify France, and enjoying the many pleasures
that Paris offers to tourists.
The women’s denial of the reality of Otar’s condition as illegal immigrant
and worker and the illusory quality of their cosmopolitan borderland are finally
exposed, at least to the spectator, when they eventually travel to Paris. Where
Bertucelli’s Georgia has a crumbling infrastructure, its poverty seems graceful
and charming; the women’s house is pleasant, full of old family objects and
good books; they even own a dacha in the country where they go to rest and
collect fruit. They are forced to sell old belongings, yet they seem to have
much. Paris, by contrast, for those coming from the East and the South, is
associated with real, ungraceful squalor. The three women stay in a cheap,
unappealing hotel, and the building where Otar lived is impersonal and
neglected, full of immigrants living on the poverty line. Mostly shot in the rain,
Paris is congested, noisy and impersonal—the opposite of Tbilisi’s pleasant
streets.
One of the film’s most significant moments is when Eka, having finally
learned of her son’s death from his former neighbour, finds herself sitting near
some railway tracks—an image powerfully suggestive of the fact that travel and
displacement killed Otar. And yet, Eka chooses to continue to delude herself;
she says to her daughter and granddaughter that Otar departed for America,
where he always wanted to go, and announces she now wants to visit Paris. A
montage of images emphasising tourist landmarks and opulent shops conveys
the women’s tourist experience. Again, they refuse to see the reality of the
immigrant’s Paris, and continue to embrace a utopian/touristic vision of La
Ville-Lumière, so much so that, at the end of their holiday, Ada decides to stay.
While Eka is delighted by Ada’s choice, which endorses and perpetuates her
belief of her family’s belonging to an imaginary France, Marina—who has
fewer illusions—is devastated.
258  L. RASCAROLI

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.

Case Study: Welcome (Philippe Lioret, 2009)

Set in Calais, Lioret’s Welcome premiered in France on 11 March 2009. On 22
September, Calais was in the news when the French police, on orders of minis-
ter Besson, dismantled ‘The Jungle’, the immigrants’ makeshift camp near the
port. After the camp was cleared, bulldozers were brought in to raze the shel-
ters (including a mosque and a shrine); many immigrants were taken to deten-
tion centres all over France, while some French rights protesters who had
scuffled with the police were also arrested. Subsequently, some suggested that
the operation was solely aimed at placating British public opinion; indeed, soon
the situation returned to ‘normality’. Currently, hundreds of immigrants live in
the area, with the sans-papiers always under threat of being arrested and
repatriated.
Lioret’s film makes explicit reference to a controversial immigration law
(L622-1), which is part of the increasingly tough measures France adopted
under Nicolas Sarkozy, first as Minister of the Interior under Jacques Chirac
(2002–2004; 2005–2007), then as President of the Republic (2007–2012).
The effects of Sarkozy’s policies are reflected in the drastic reduction in accep-
tances of applications for asylum during the period; rejections went from 20%
in the 1980s to 83.4% in 2006 (Lydie 2008: 78). The law referenced in the
ironically titled Welcome, a norm included in the 2009 Finance Law, set a quota
for arrests of those who help illegal immigrants at 5000 for 2009 and 5500 for
2011. Helping illegal immigrants carries a penalty of up to five years’ imprison-
ment and a €30,000 fine. Within the tight confines of this norm, the work of
volunteers and charities is also regarded as a crime.
The redefinition of identities and readjustment of cultural perceptions
through the journey of emigration are on the agenda in Welcome, for all that it
is not a traditional road movie. While completely revolving around a trip, most
of the film focuses on a stopover in the protagonist’s journey, and is therefore
rather static both in its location and its employment of a rather static camera.
In it, 17-year-old Kurdish refugee, Bilal (Firat Ayverdi), is stuck in Calais, hav-
ing travelled on foot from Kurdistan, covering 4000  kilometres in three
months, with the aim of reaching his girlfriend, who has immigrated to London
with her family. His epic journey is not visualised; its hardships are not com-
pletely lost on the spectator, however, especially when Bilal recounts having
 14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE  259

been captured by the Turkish army and forced to wear a black bag over his
head for eight days. This piece of information places in an even more tragic
light his first attempt at crossing the Channel aboard a lorry; incapable of keep-
ing a plastic bag over his head to evade the CO2 monitoring at the border, Bilal
gives away both himself and the other stowaways, who are all arrested. Realising
that it will be impossible for him to cross the Channel in this manner, he
decides to learn to swim and starts attending the local pool to take lessons from
Simon (Vincent Lindon). Simon begins to help Bilal mainly in hopes of
impressing his former wife, who is a volunteer providing food for the immi-
grants at the port. Slowly, however, he forges a solid bond with Bilal, won over
by the teenager’s vast determination and swimming talent.
Calais truly is the ‘last border’ for Bilal, who has no interest in staying in
France and, like so many immigrants from Africa and the Middle East today,
has his mind set on the UK. The strongest source of tension in the film is time:
Bilal is under pressure because his girlfriend’s father is about to marry her to a
cousin. His entrapment in Calais is compounded by the proximity of his desti-
nation and by his progressive realisation of the imperviousness of the last bor-
der. Thus, the whole city is a frontier for the migrants; it is not a destination
but something in between a prison and an enforced purgatory, complete with
tantalising views of paradise in the shape of the White Cliffs of Dover. Precisely
as in Far, the port and beach, two of the film’s main settings, are constructed
as liminal spaces. It is winter, and the climate in Calais being much colder than
in Tangier means that these margins look significantly less colourful and wel-
coming. The area of the port that is used for the distribution of food is squalid
and open, providing no refuge from the police and the bitter cold. The beach,
permanently shot in an icy, grey light, with its air of wintertime abandonment,
does not invite bodily pleasures, but is a containing border, from which Bilal
longingly gazes at England and plans his crossing.
The most distinctive borderland in the film, however, is the swimming pool.
Because of the unforgiving cold of the sea, it is the warmer and safer water that
provides the fluidity of a margin in which an illegal immigrant may find refuge
and friendship and prepare for the next and final leg of his journey. It is most
significant, however, that the swimming pool is not a cell of political dissent
within mainstream society and is not welcoming from the start. Simon lets Bilal
enter because he pays for his lessons, but throws out his friends who are ready
to pay for a shower, and even threatens to call the police. The pool—which
displays a large sign for the local swimming team, ‘Calais Natation’, and whose
lane ropes and swimming aids are in the tricolored hues of the national flag—is
suggestive of both the local and the national enclaves. Through it, it is the
nation itself that is depicted as a borderland, one where the rigidity of the law
and the brutality of its enforcement (the police are shown in a particularly criti-
cal light in the film), as well as the paranoia dominating part of the public
opinion, are in evidence. And yet, this is also a space where some individuals act
upon their convictions and, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would have it,
live ‘smooth’ in a ‘striated space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).
260  L. RASCAROLI

The idea of the striation of space by organising principles such as money,

work, roads and housing is particularly useful when thinking of this film, which
explores the tension between settled and rootless peoples. Deleuze and
Guattari, indeed, introduced the concept of striation in a bid to distinguish
between sedentary and nomadic lives. The normalising function not only of
the law, but also of social institutions such as work, is much emphasised in
Welcome, and the effects of economic and institutional striation are evident
everywhere. One of the film’s most striking sequences is the arrival of the lorry
with the stowaways into the port of Calais at night; the long shot reveals an
intricate but perfectly functional system of suspended roads, which look like a
maze of illuminated strips. Here, as in the other films, trade and money regu-
late life and movement, and goods travel much more easily than people do.
Even the sea in Welcome is striated; each time it is framed, ferries and ships cross
the shot. Yet, the sea is also a fluid, ‘smooth’ space, which suggests the possibil-
ity of renegotiating identities, travelling, communicating and starting anew.
While Bilal’s second attempt at crossing is not visualised, the final one is.
However, there is no ‘hitting the road’ here, with all that the topos implies and
that is so fundamental to the road movie’s kinetic poetics and aesthetics. No
exhilarating extra-diegetic music elicits strong emotions; no sense of liberation
from inertia is experienced; no exploration of transforming panoramas is
offered. The audience’s expectations of the genre are frustrated. The harrow-
ing sequence of Bilal’s swim towards England is set in a leaden, cold sea; framed
from above in long shot, Bilal looks like a fragile if purposeful dot in the homo-
geneous expanse of the sea, in which no signposting, no directions, no land-
marks indicate the way and reassure us as to the traveller’s position. Accompanied
by an ominous, sad score, Bilal’s solitude and vulnerability as a clandestine
migrant are further highlighted by his encounters with large ships. The water
in which he floats is no amniotic fluid; there is no rebirth, no redemption for
the Kurdish teenager in the English Channel. Water is the most significant ele-
ment of Welcome, and replaces the road almost completely; it is not only in the
sea but also and more extensively in the swimming pool, indeed, that the film’s
travelling takes place. Bilal covers many kilometres swimming back and forth,
day and night, in the pool. This, however, is no forward movement; rather, it
is an incessant coming and going which is ultimately solipsistic, repetitive and
somewhat obsessive. No release of tension is ever achieved in Welcome.
Unfortunately for Bilal, despite its physical malleability, uncontainability and
permeability, the sea has been transformed into a hard border. As he approaches
the English coast, he is spotted by a British police boat patrolling the coast, and
dies tragically in the desperate attempt to escape arrest. Welcome’s ending
makes the point that if we deprive clandestine immigrants of their rights and
consider them juridically as ‘inexistent nonpersons’, in Balibar’s words, what
we actually do is “transform the way we control frontiers, under the pretext of
checking traffic in human labour. This control instead becomes a true war, on
land and sea, and is waged right up to the borders of the Schengen countries,
and its victims can be counted in thousands of dead bodies” (Balibar 2003:
 14  ON THE EVE OF THE JOURNEY: THE NEW EUROPEAN ROAD MOVIE  261

38). When, at the end of his tragic swim towards England, he is spotted by the
police only 800 metres from the coast, Bilal turns and seems to want to swim
back towards Calais. It is of course a gesture born of despair, but one that
evokes the image of Bilal compulsively swimming back and forth in the pool,
going nowhere. Bilal dies as a victim in a war in which the police feel entitled
to chase him pitilessly until he drowns.

Conclusion
What these road movies problematise, then, through their emphasis on meta-
phorical borderlands and their scenarios of stasis, circularity and repetition, is
the view of both the North and of Western Europe as the cradle of ever-­growing
civilisation and democracy and as the home of a progress which is identified
with unstoppable forward motion. Prioritising immobility and the tension of
stasis, circularity and repetition over the catharsis of movement, they express
deep social tensions, both in considering the position of those—migrant work-
ers, postcolonial ‘inheritors’, and refugees—who contemplate border crossings
and the nature of these borders. Questions of power and rights arise, particu-
larly in relation to the physical, social and legal barriers to transit which these
films dramatise and in the context of the challenges they present to the dis-
courses of globalisation which dominated the last decades of the twentieth
century. France, here, is repositioned away from the ‘centre’ of Europeanness;
while its colonial history remains visible, it is either evacuated from the films as
a distinct site of identity and meaning or situated merely as another ‘border-
land’ which must be crossed. Indeed, what we are given to see in each of these
films is far from the idealised borderless Europe of free movement. Instead, the
question of how to cross borders constitutes an almost insurmountable prob-
lem 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, conse-
quently, 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 des-
tination for emigration, its harsh reality clashes so profoundly with the charac-
ters’ 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 dis-
courses that equate modernity with progress and liberal capitalism with
democracy.

Questions for Group Discussion

1. How does the road movie, as a genre, lend itself to considerations of

Europe and what it means to consider oneself ‘European’?
2. Do you see differences between the European road movie, as described
here, and the American road movie?
262  L. RASCAROLI

3. The writer says “It is not necessary for a film to include images of a bor-
der in order to evoke it”. What does she mean? Do you agree?
4. How do these films ask us to consider differences between the movement
of people and goods across international borders?
5. Can films like these function as political statements and tools, and if so
how? Do they offer any solutions to the problem of borders?
6. How do these films represent globalisation and ideas of ‘old Europe’ and
‘new Europe’?

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