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10 great European road movies-BFI

With the release of Pawel Pawlikowski‟s award-winning drama Ida on BFI Player, we‟re

setting off on 10 more unmissable road trips across Europe.

Samuel Wigley25 September 2014

 

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Ida (2013)

 

Watch Ida on the BFI Player  

  10 great American road trip films 

 

10 great films set in Berlin 

  10 great films set on the Mediterranean 

At last year‟s London Film Festival, a black -and-white road movie about a nun took the prize

for best film from under the feet of competitors including Under the Skin, The Selfish Giant 

and The Double. Shot within a nearly square, 1:37 frame, Ida is a resolutely small film but

the buzz around it is that Pawel Pawlikowski, a Polish director with a clutch of acclaimed

British films to his name (Last Resort, 2000; My Summer of Love, 2004), had returned to

Poland and come up with an immaculately conceived, modest yet exquisite gem.

It‟s the story of Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), who has grown up in a rural convent after

 being orphaned during the Second World War. On the cusp of taking her vows, she is

instructed to travel to see her aunt, a hard-drinking judge (Agata Kulesza) who is able to help

her shed light on the truth about her parents‟ history. 

10 to try 

Each of the recommendations included here is available to view in the UK.

The road trip that ensues is typical of the European strain of the genre. Where American road

movies are frequently about escape, freedom and lawlessness, so often European examples

are journeys into the continent‟s fractious political history, where buried memories from the

 past are traversed and crisscrossed along with national boundaries.

As the wait is finally over for Ida‟s release in cinemas and on BFI Player, here are 10 more

continental trips worth taking.

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Wild Strawberries (1957)

Director Ingmar Bergman

Swedish master  Ingmar Bergman isn‟t always given the credit he deserves as a pioneer of the

road movie, but his 1957 film Wild Strawberries helped set a template that would be much

imitated.

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Its idea is very simple: an elderly professor, Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), learns he is to

receive an honorary degree and sets out on the long car drive from Stockholm to his old

university in Lund in the southern tip of Sweden. In the company of his daughter-in-law

(Ingrid Thulin), the trip also becomes a journey into the past, as the ageing Borg revisits the

scenes of his youth and reflects on an unhappy marriage. The succession of hitchhikers whocatch a ride with the professor keep the film routed in the present, even as it spirals off into

internal dreams, doubts and reveries. It‟s one of Bergman‟s finest inquiries into a human soul,

and –  together with The Seventh Seal (1957) –  put him firmly on the international map as one

of cinema‟s most fearless filmmakers. 

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Pierrot le fou (1965)

Director Jean-Luc Godard

Hollywood classics such as You Only Live Once (1937) and They Live by Night (1948) had

long established the archetype of doomed, criminal lovers taking to the road to escape their

fate. Continuing his headlong reinvention of cinema (this was his tenth film in six years),

French New Wave director  Jean-Luc Godard used the model to tell the story of what he

called the “last romantic couple”: a Parisian (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and his babysitter

(Godard‟s then-wife Anna Karina) who take off for the south of France with a cache of gun-

running money.

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In true Godardian style, the flimsy plot plays coathanger for satirical digressions (on

commercialism and the Vietnam war), kaleidoscopic stylistic devices, sunny musical

numbers and a merciless examination of male-female incompatibility, shot in intoxicating

 primary colours by Raoul Coutard. Only two years later, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) took

lessons learned from French films like this to reinvigorate Hollywood cinema and kickstart anew trend for American road movies.

Kings of the Road (1976)

Director Wim Wenders

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Like Godard, New German Cinema director  Wim Wenders had a love/hate relationship with

America. Love in that he was infatuated with Hollywood cinema; hate in that he could see

how Europeans were in thrall to American culture and capitalism. As hitchhiker Robert

Lander (Hanns Zischler ) puts it in this 1976 film: “The Americans have colonised our

subconscious.” 

Following Alice in the Cities (1974) and Wrong Move (1975), Kings of the Road is the third

and most expansive in a trilogy of road movies that Wenders made in the mid-70s. Pushing

three hours in length and shot in lustrous black and white by celebrated cinematographer

Robby Müller, it follows two men –  a travelling projector repairman and a hitchhiker he

 befriends –  as they drive the roads near to the border with East Germany to carry out

maintenance at dilapidated local cinemas. It‟s a buddy-buddy adventure movie of sorts, but

with the emphasis shifted to atmosphere, mood, the behaviour of men and the dynamics of

friendship.

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Radio On (1980)

Director Chris Petit

Radio On is a precious one-off in post-punk era British cinema that reflects the same

fascination with German culture and signifiers that was evidenced in the music of David

Bowie and Joy Division at the time. Not only is its soundtrack packed with Berlin-era Bowie

and Kraftwerk, but it also proudly displays its debt to Wim Wenders‟ road films in its steely

monochrome photography and wandering eye for desolate urban landscapes.

Chris Petit‟s striking debut, produced by the BFI Production Board in 1979, remains surelythe only film to have made mythic use of the M4, as we join Robert (David Beames) in his

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car on a trip from London to Bristol to investigate his brother‟s death. That mystery isn‟t so

central to the film though; as with Alice in the Cities or Kings of the Road it‟s the cinematic

nature of the journey that counts, with its occasion for bizarre roadside encounters,

meandering narrative byways and a gloomy survey of Britain at a precise point at the dawn of

the Thatcher era.

 

Buy Radio On on BFI DVD 

Vagabond (1985)

Director Agnès Varda

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So many of the films on the list show the influence of the American road movie on European

filmmakers, but also the ways in which films from the continent have fed back into American

inspiration. And so it is with Agnès Varda‟s extraordinary 1985 film Vagabond, which

clearly provided a model for  Kelly Reichardt‟s much later film about female homelessness

and a life on the road, Wendy and Lucy (2008).

Varda‟s film‟s French title is Sans toit ni loi („Without roof nor law‟) and it begins with the

discovery of the corpse of a young woman who has frozen to death in a roadside ditch. In

flashback, it then traces the final days of Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) as she drifts from place

to place in the south of France, scraping together an existence from random work and

encounters. In a manner similar to the recent British documentary Dreams of a Life (2011), it

also includes pseudo-documentary interviews with the people who met her, gradually piecing

together a picture of a singular, aggressively self-dependent free spirit.

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Ariel (1988)

Director Aki Kaurismäki

Among European directors, Finnish auteur  Aki Kaurismäki is rivalled only by Wim Wenders

in his fondness for the road movie and automobile culture, with Leningrad Cowboys Go

America (1989) and Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (1994) other notable examples. 1988‟s

Ariel begins with Taisto Kasurinen (Turo Pajala) inheriting a white cadillac after his father

kills himself. Out of work after the Lapland mine where he works closes, he uses the

gleaming vehicle to escape to Helsinki, but soon gets into even deeper trouble after he is

framed for a crime he didn‟t commit. 

Though its journey narrative comes to a lengthy pit-stop in the big city, not least because

Taisto ends up behind bars, the cadillac remains an almost talismanic symbol of freedom and

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existential cool. With a wonderful soundtrack of Baltic pop and tango, and Kaurismäki‟s

trademark minimalism and ice-dry humour to the fore, Ariel firmly announced the arrival of a

major new filmmaking talent.

Landscape in the Mist (1988)

Director Theo Angelopoulos

Theo Angelopoulos‟s magisterial drama follows a young brother and sister as they make their

faltering way from their home in Greece to Germany, where they hope to find their long-lost

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father. There are elements of a fairytale quest here, albeit one dashed with quixotic

hopelessness and rooted in the specifics of its location: a wintry Balkans of truck stops,

motorways, train stations and other marginal spaces where two children can slip around and

 between an adult world of often harrowing realities.

A succession of dreamlike, monumental images stick in the head: a horse dying in the street

as a wedding party passes by; a huge stone hand being airlifted from the sea and carried over

the cityscape; figures clinging to a border fence like birds on the wire. This is one of the best

films of the 1980s.

Gallivant (1996)

Director Andrew Kötting

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Despite the notable exceptions included here, it‟s often said  of the British that we can‟t really

do road movies: our dual carriageways and motorways don‟t have the mythic quality of the

German autobahns or Americans highways, and few British car journeys last more than a few

hours.

But consider two documentaries 70 years apart. First, 1925‟s The Open Road, in which

 pioneer filmmaker  Claude Friese-Greene created an invaluable record of 1920s Britain by

filming his journey from Land‟s End to John O‟Groats. Then there‟s Gallivant, an

experimental travelogue in which Andrew Kötting took his 85-year-old grandmother Gladys

and his seven-year-old daughter Eden, who suffers from the rare genetic disorder Joubert‟s

Syndrome, on a clockwise tour around the coastline of Great Britain. As the life expectancy

of both his travelling companions is sadly limited, the unique trip is undercut with a sense of

mortality, but the sheer force of vitality on display –  both in the growing closeness of Gladys

and Eden, and in Kötting‟s survey of British people, places and folk traditions –  is very funny

and very moving. Happily, Eden is still alive today and appears in the director‟s later film,This Our Still Life (2011).

  Buy The Open Road on BFI DVD 

 

Buy Gallivant on BFI DVD 

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Red Lights (2003)

Director Cédric Kahn

Cédric Kahn‟s delicious 2004 thriller takes place during one summer‟s „grand départ‟, the

annual July exodus that sees Parisians leave the capital en masse for their holidays. Jean-

Pierre Darroussin and Carole Bouquet  play married couple Antoine and Hélène Dunan,

whose road trip to pick up their children from summer camp to go on holiday together is

 beset first with bickering, then with something darker and deadlier.

There are bits of Godard‟s Week End (1967) in here (the view of le grand départ as a pressure

cooker for animosity and violence), a smattering of nods to  North by Northwest (1959), as

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well as memories of  The Vanishing (after Hélène seemingly disappears without trace after a

dispute at a service station). But the mix of comedy and detached horror feels bracingly

original, quirky and sinister.

Locke (2013)

Director Steven Knight

Locke was a pleasant surprise among modern UK films: not just a grippingly emotional

drama set almost entirely within the confines of a travelling car, but also a uniquely British

road movie that invests a night-time drive from Birmingham to Croydon with nail-biting

tension without any recourse to psychotic hitchhikers or high-speed chases.

Tom Hardy  plays a construction engineer who abandons his building site on the eve of “the

 biggest concrete pour in Europe” to make a journey south in order to do the right thing by awoman colleague who‟s gone into labour with his child. The drama takes the form of a

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compelling series of mobile conversations from his driving seat, during which he must not

only make work arrangements to keep everything on track but also break the news of his

infidelity to his wife and children. There‟s terrific work from Hardy here, a range of emotions

and frustrations playing out across his face, and as his passengers we‟re gripped for the whole

ride, never tempted to ask “Are we there yet?”