10 great European road movies-BFI

With the release of Pawel Pawlikowskis award-winning drama Ida on BFI Player, were
setting off on 10 more unmissable road trips across Europe.
Samuel Wigley
25 September 2014

Ida (2013)

Watch Ida on the BFI Player

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At last years 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.
Its 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 continents fractious political history, where buried memories from the
past are traversed and crisscrossed along with national boundaries.
As the wait is finally over for Idas release in cinemas and on BFI Player, here are 10 more
continental trips worth taking.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Director Ingmar Bergman

Swedish master Ingmar Bergman isnt 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.

Its idea is very simple: an elderly professor, Isak Borg (Victor Sjstrm), 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 who
catch a ride with the professor keep the film routed in the present, even as it spirals off into
internal dreams, doubts and reveries. Its one of Bergmans finest inquiries into a human soul,
and together with The Seventh Seal (1957) put him firmly on the international map as one
of cinemas most fearless filmmakers.

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
(Godards then-wife Anna Karina) who take off for the south of France with a cache of gunrunning money.

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 a
new trend for American road movies.
Kings of the Road (1976)
Director Wim Wenders

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 Mller, 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. Its a buddy-buddy adventure movie of sorts, but
with the emphasis shifted to atmosphere, mood, the behaviour of men and the dynamics of
friendship.

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

car on a trip from London to Bristol to investigate his brothers death. That mystery isnt so
central to the film though; as with Alice in the Cities or Kings of the Road its 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 Agns Varda

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 Agns Vardas extraordinary 1985 film Vagabond, which
clearly provided a model for Kelly Reichardts much later film about female homelessness
and a life on the road, Wendy and Lucy (2008).
Vardas films 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.

Ariel (1988)
Director Aki Kaurismki

Among European directors, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismki 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. 1988s
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 didnt 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

existential cool. With a wonderful soundtrack of Baltic pop and tango, and Kaurismkis
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 Angelopouloss 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

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 Ktting

Despite the notable exceptions included here, its often said of the British that we cant really
do road movies: our dual carriageways and motorways dont 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, 1925s The Open Road, in which
pioneer filmmaker Claude Friese-Greene created an invaluable record of 1920s Britain by
filming his journey from Lands End to John OGroats. Then theres Gallivant, an
experimental travelogue in which Andrew Ktting took his 85-year-old grandmother Gladys
and his seven-year-old daughter Eden, who suffers from the rare genetic disorder Jouberts
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 Kttings survey of British people, places and folk traditions is very funny
and very moving. Happily, Eden is still alive today and appears in the directors later film,
This Our Still Life (2011).

Buy The Open Road on BFI DVD

Buy Gallivant on BFI DVD

Red Lights (2003)

Director Cdric Kahn

Cdric Kahns delicious 2004 thriller takes place during one summers grand dpart, the
annual July exodus that sees Parisians leave the capital en masse for their holidays. JeanPierre Darroussin and Carole Bouquet play married couple Antoine and Hlne 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 Godards Week End (1967) in here (the view of le grand dpart as a pressure
cooker for animosity and violence), a smattering of nods to North by Northwest (1959), as

well as memories of The Vanishing (after Hlne 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 a
woman colleague whos gone into labour with his child. The drama takes the form of a

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. Theres terrific work from Hardy here, a range of emotions
and frustrations playing out across his face, and as his passengers were gripped for the whole
ride, never tempted to ask Are we there yet?