Traveling in French Cinema

Sylvie Blum-Reid

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349579549, 9781137553539
• eBook ISBN: 9781137553546
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

Travel narratives abound in French cinema since the 1980s. This study delineates recurrent travel tropes in films such as departures and returns, the chase, the escape, nomadic wandering, interior voyages, the unlikely travel, rituals, pilgrimages, migrants' narratives and emergencies, women's travel, and healing narratives.

1
Departures

Variations on the Euro-trip

This chapter charts a two-prong approach to Cédric Klapisch and Tony Gatlif in their films L’Auberge espagnole (2002), Gadjo Dilo (1997) and Exils (2004). The second part examines Tony Gatlif, the Franco-Algerian-Gypsy filmmaker’s background and his experience as a migrant and exile who left Algeria for France in the 1960s. I choose the trope of departure as well as the fabrication of a European travel film type as a motivating force. I borrow from Star Studies in order to analyze the performance of Romain Duris, an actor shared by the two filmmakers.

In what is unofficially entitled La Trilogie des Voyages de Xavier/The Trilogy of Xavier’s Trips, Cédric Klapisch confirms his intention to place travel at the center of his protagonist’s experience. The final installment, Casse-tête chinois/Chinese Puzzle, came out in 2013, eleven years after the first film L’Auberge espagnole/The Spanish Inn (2002). The first part of the chapter concentrates on the first two films of the trilogy. Klapisch follows a young twenty-five–year-old French man Xavier Rousseau (Romain Duris) who decides to study Spanish in Barcelona and complete his studies. Xavier’s (auto)biographical account stretches roughly over twenty years of his life.

In the first part, Xavier leaves everyone and everything behind, his country, mother, girlfriend, and his maternal language/native tongue, and becomes an exchange student or, poetically speaking, ‘a foreigner in a foreign land’. The entire story is projected against the ambitious backdrop of the constitution of the European community, harmoniously experienced at its most microcosmic level: Xavier shares an apartment with seven European roommates, a sort of tower of Babel at the heart of Barcelona. Europe is typecast by six members (out of twenty-five then) with Denmark, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Great Britain, and France, leaving out other nations. Xavier’s future is carved out for him: he is to become a young technocrat or white-collar worker, a cadre, an insider of the new European financial elite, with headquarters at the Ministry of Finance in Bercy. The director even thanks minister Fabius in the final credit sequence.¹ Xavier secures an Erasmus grant that consists in [Erasmus is] a European Commission exchange programme that enables students in 31 European countries to study for part of their degree in another country and provides ‘A fun challenging experience’, as detailed by the following goals:

The confidence to live in another country
New or improved language skills
New perspectives on an academic subject
An international network of friends
Travel opportunities throughout Europe
Academic credits
Transferable employment skills.²

However, in an unexpected twist, and after many tribulations, the experience abroad proves life changing for Xavier as he drops everything upon his return to France, unable to follow the plan. Stylistically, the escape figure culminates in one of the final scenes located at the Ministry of Finances when he turns his back on a diploma, runs away, and opts for a ‘jobless future.’ The implicit sequel Les Poupées Russes/Russian Dolls (2005) is outlined at the end of the first film, preparing the spectator for the next phase. Xavier decides to return to his childhood dreams of becoming a writer. The end (of the film) formally constitutes the beginning of his living up to his true aspirations, and the recovery of self, shedding the path that was preordained by his father and father’s (business) partner and dictated by class. Reaching this stage takes multiple trajectories that Xavier experiences physically and psychically, providing several false beginnings to the turn of events that he desperately wants to tell us/spectators.³

L’Auberge espagnole

The somewhat autobiographical plot transposes Klapisch’s own trajectory following his failure to enter the French national film school and his decision to live in New York for two years and study filmmaking at New York University. In 2002 Spain, one of Europe’s preferred tourist destinations, was at the height of its economic bubble. A long instructive review of L’Auberge espagnole found on a website for fun European vacations, displays alongside it information for travelers, bathroom decorations tips, and wardrobe advice for women.⁴

I read the film as a travel narrative, and will henceforth refer to it as part of the European-travel or euro-trip – a name that I adopt for lack of a better term. I attempt to situate and track the trend in contemporary French but also European cinema. Of course, this is an elastic label, as the notion of genre clearly demonstrated by Rick Altman’s study is fluid rather than static, and with it the notion of national cinema. Raphaëlle Moine observes that genres are an abstract construct that serves to regroup films as well as a concrete construct (11). The Euro-travel genre is a minor genre, a direct heir to adventure films, branching off sometimes into comedy, but it is the beginning of a more serious trend that is born of transnational routes, displacement, migration, and expatriation scenarios that constitute one of the tropes of our postmodern era.

Genres are ‘specific networks of formulas which deliver a certified product to the waiting customer. They ensure the production of meaning by regulating the viewer’s relation to the images and narratives constructed for him or her. In fact, genres construct the proper spectator for their own consumption’ (Andrew 110). L’Auberge espagnole parallels and mimics the advent of TV-reality shows that occurred at the beginning of the 1990s on French television. Programs such as Loft Story and Nice People were based on a formula that brought together a group of European roommates to test their skills at adaptation in a collective space.⁵ Loft Story moved from French television channel M6 to TF1 in 2003 on the heels of the successful Klapisch film and its new European twist: ‘M6 already had its “loft” presented by Benjamin Castaldi, TF1 will have its Auberge espagnole starting in May.’⁶

Altman explains genre as a ‘complex concept with multiple meanings’, some of which are determined by the industry and others by viewing positions (14). His study relies mostly on Hollywood classical cinema, but raises the possibility that genres are possibly teaching us something about a nation and may be codified by certain parameters shared by a nation. For the present chapter, I focus on the ‘Europeanness’ of the genre, as it ventures into the different nations constitutive of Europe. This way, the main character’s learning experience passes through his adolescent-like state reflective of the state of Europe in its infancy, learning, vacillating, and charting something different, new and collective. The film of course cannot speak for the (then) twenty-five member countries of the European Union, nor can it speak for the future candidates to the Union that were standing by in 1996, for example Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Poland, and Slovenia, that became European Union members after its release.

L’Auberge espagnole activates at least two types of travel: one is couched in the Bildungsroman type, or roman d’apprentissage inherent to the genre and the other is the escape. Both are not necessarily mutually exclusive. To travel, wrote Montaigne, is not only about learning but also about ‘fleeing’.⁷ Xavier has a nagging impulse to escape from France, his mother, and possibly his girlfriend. By the end of the trilogy, he has mastered the form and adapted to living as an exile.

Timothy Corrigan’s analysis of road movies finds a few emerging traits in the 1950s that reflect a breakdown of the family structure, taken from an essentially male perspective as well as a quest.⁸ The structure evolves in the 1960s and 1970s when the typical male-buddy system breaks down and loses its innocence. Eventually in the 1980s, the genre crashes, allowing for the appearance of women as in Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991) and Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (1985). Through the example of Wim Wenders’s Paris Texas, Corrigan takes us through the story of Travis,

a wanderer who has not only lost a family and an identity but, more importantly in some ways, a road and a car. … What Travis might have been searching for once is what most road questers invariably want: an authentic home, a lost origin where what you see is what you are (154).

L’Auberge espagnole retains some of the genre markers and confirms a quest for some lost origins that is the topic of yet another euro-travel movie, directed by Gatlif, Gadjo Dilo/The Crazy Foreigner/L’Etranger fou (1997). Although Klapisch’s film is not a road movie in a strict classical sense, the filmmaker cast Xavier as a character in search of himself, who ‘does not exist yet, who is on the path, [but] there is not yet a highway traced for him.’⁹ The myth of the road erupts in the narrative, yet roads are symbolic as the character leaves for a metaphoric open road.

Xavier’s strained relationship with his divorced mother (and his girlfriend) that is more or less resolved at the close of the film, if one accepts that sharing a steak with one’s vegetarian mother and engaging in friendly conversation is a sign of conflict resolution. The father is absent from his life. Leaving France comes at a cost. The character breaks down several times.

Klapisch advocates the importance of erasing boundaries, walls, and stereotypes in order to recognize and embrace the multiplicity of identities that constitute not only Europe but also being French at this historical juncture. He moves away from the Franco-French concerns that plague much of French cinema, and opens up the perspective. Xavier’s voice-over narration literally takes off when it tackles these issues. The image of an airport runway and jetty is inserted several times to illustrate the movement of the plot.

Paradoxically it is a young African student – a fleeting appearance in the film who claimed the importance of maintaining a Catalan language and identity at a time when the European Union is debated at an earlier point in the film – who explains the identity politics that Xavier adheres to during a group discussion. The man from Gambia argues in favor of Catalan: ‘It’s not about an identity, but about the respect of identities.’ Xavier reconsiders his French identity from this point on and definitely lets go of the ‘gaulois’ shared heritage advocated by the French neurosurgeon comrade who resettled in Spain with his wife.¹⁰ Interestingly, the film does not use Catalan as a means of communication once the somewhat radical call for a Catalan identity and language is made.

The story of a taking-off

Immersion in a foreign language and the encounter with Others contribute to building the narrative. Xavier would probably be on his way to a business career, complete with a business suit and life in a ‘square’ world. He turns his back on a nostalgic time when people would grow their own food and live on a farm, as in Le Monde de Martine or Martine à la ferme, a series of French children’s books first published in 1954, which he shows to his more evolved girlfriend who rebels against the sexist image inherent to the story. His narrow world tumbles down very quickly with what he describes as the big bordel (the big mess), signifying the real world and especially Europe.

Xavier’s real aspirations are not clearly defined. The film provokes a tension between a desire for simplicity or a return to a Rousseauesque natural world, and the desire for a big messy ‘Euro-pudding.’ It is in the big mess that Xavier finds himself. He becomes his own agent when he mediates with the landowner in Barcelona, avoiding eviction for the group.

The discovery of self passes through the filters of sexuality, eroticism, women, friendships, and travel. The film presents a relatively simple perspective that was not spared by Cahiers du cinéma critics. Thus some explain Klapisch’s film(s) as,

Un petit cinéma de l’ingénuité post-adolescente dont Klapisch s’est fait le chantre depuis Le péril jeune … L’Auberge espagnole ressemble à un Loft qui fonctionnerait non pas selon un principe d’exclusion et de resserrement progressif mais selon son exact contraire: un élargissement progressif (du cadre, des personnages) entraînant tout le monde dans un souci de boulimie euphorique et globalisant. (Malausa 86)¹¹ (A small cinema about post-adolescent ingenuity, of which Klapisch seems to be the master, since School Daze …. L’Auberge resembles the Loft, which would operate not only according to a principle of exclusion and a progressive tightening but its exact contrary, a widening (of the frame, or characters) bringing everyone into a euphoric and globalizing sense of bulimia.)

Yet, there is more depth to the film. Xavier does not resemble the prototypical traveler: once he arrives in Barcelona and settles in the ‘Spanish inn’, he becomes a sedentary student of a foreign culture. His urban wandering reveals a fascination for Barcelona, the city that the director views as mythical and that appears at times in a touristy, clichéd way (Gaudí’s architecture, the port), sampling some of its tourist landmarks in one sequence and the less known Barcelona at other times. As he did in Chacun cherche son chat/When the Cat is Away (1996), Klapisch walks us through an architectural tour of the city, and maps out its geography first perceived through foreign eyes (most like those of the spectators). He exploits the notion of habitus and living in a city that at first is foreign, but will become natural once lived-in, echoing Georges Perec’s notion of the city and the neighborhood. What does living in a foreign city mean at first? Xavier responds: ‘After a while, all this belongs to you because you’ve lived there.’

Traveling through language, traveling through the city

Traveling is first and foremost traveling in a (foreign) language and being seduced by foreign names and words. Incidentally, the traveler is protected by the barrier of the foreign language, which can be beneficial to his ears in the way relayed by Roland Barthes of his own travel experience in Japan in Empire of Signs,

The murmuring mass of an unknown language constitutes a delicate protection, envelops the foreigner (provided the country is not hostile to him) in an auditory film, which halts at his ears all the alienations of the mother tongue … Hence, in foreign countries, what a respite! Here I am protected against stupidity, vulgarity, vanity, worldliness, nationality, and normality (9).

The streets of Barcelona become a text, a grid on the screen, displaying Xavier lugging his bags, and spelling out foreign names like Urquinaona, and mixing world geography locations, while celebrating the pleasure of naming and the poetry of the text:

Urquinaona s’est glissé doucement autour de Mouffetard, de Ponto Combo, de … Knock le Zout…. Il est devenu normal et familier. (‘Urquinaona slipped quietly around Mouffetard, Ponto Combo, and Knock le Zout … It became normal and familiar.’)

The traveler gets acquainted with space, a new geography and a new vocabulary in a visual crisscrossing of streets or roads. The foreign city in time becomes familiar, natural, and homelike, and upon return the home city (Paris) treats Xavier as a foreigner. Exile creates a distance in one’s rapport with language, with one’s nation and its inhabitants, one’s parents, and one’s self. Leïla Sebbar, in a letter exchange with Nancy Huston, summarizes the exilic state as ‘residing in a border zone, always on the side, neither in nor out, but in a permanent state of imbalance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Departures
• 2 Rituals: The Unlikely Journey
• 3 Vagabondages
• 4 The Return or the Nostoï
• 5 Transit
• 6 Rebels and Flâneuses
• 7 Dérives
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index