‘Flesh and Fuel’ Assessment: Two Lonely Truckers Share Europe’s Highways — and A lot, A lot Extra — in an Unlikely Highway Romance with Loads of Coronary heart

In an odd coincidence that exhibits how a lot this type of story was burning to be instructed, two films debuting at main festivals this previous yr have each depicted the identical unlikely homosexual romance — one involving gritty, hardworking skilled truckers residing on the highway.

The primary was director David Pablos’ powerful and punishing Mexican thriller On the Highway, which premiered in Venice and walked away with the Orizzonti prize. Violent, stylized and sexually specific, it managed to spin a surprisingly shifting love story out of loads of bullets and bodily fluids, leaving the viewer shaken by the point the gasoline lastly ran out.

French filmmaker Pierre Le Gall’s promising characteristic debut, Flesh and Gas (Du Fioul dans les artères), which premieres in Cannes‘ Critics’ Week sidebar, performs like a young, extra hopeful Gallic cousin to that darkish film.

Not that this relationship drama isn’t with out conflicts, hang-ups and kerfuffles, lots of them involving the logistical difficulties of hooking up whenever you’re continually on the freeway and compelled to fulfill stringent supply deadlines all through Europe. But in what might have been one other existential and really French story of unattainable love, albeit one set predominantly within the cabins of 18-wheelers or nameless roadside relaxation stops, Le Gall has boldly chosen to supply up the opportunity of redemption.

That appears unlikely at first, given the movie’s stoical protagonist and the sooty, fairly soulless world he inhabits, which appears like the best setting for an additional downbeat Dardennes brothers flick. Certainly, once we first meet 40-something Étienne (Alexis Manenti), he’s so dedicated to his longtime job as a professional trucker — a job, we be taught, that his father additionally did earlier than him — that he has little time for something past hitting the highway over and over.

As the highest driver at his regional French transport firm, Étienne all the time delivers on schedule and serves as a job mannequin for brand new recruits, together with the unruly if endearing Jordan (Armindo Alves de Sa), who’s solely beginning to be taught the ropes. At any time when he’s not behind the wheel, Étienne stays in shut contact together with his sister (Julie Duclos) and her child, whom he showers with items and Facetime calls from wherever he occurs to be parked.

There’s only one twist to his monastic life on the freeway, and we find out about it early on when Étienne drifts away from a relaxation cease into a close-by forest crammed with fellow homosexual truckers trying to cruise. Le Gall and DP Antoine Cormier (The Kingdom) seize that sequence in an virtually mystical method, lending class to all of the random couplings. They do the identical for different scenes that handle to search out magnificence in faceless areas, bringing a welcome shade of heat to locations most of us would drive by and shortly overlook.

Étienne, nonetheless, by no means forgets his first tussle within the woods with Bartosz (Julian Swiezewski), a Polish trucker who saves his lover’s pores and skin when the cops present as much as arrest them and different males for indecent habits. The 2 wind up crossing paths once more and hooking up way more intensely, in a sweaty and passionate bout of lovemaking that units the stage for a real romance.

You’ll be able to see why the 2 are attracted to one another, and it’s not solely as a result of they each spend their days and nights driving turnpikes for lengthy stretches. As a lot as Étienne is quiet and contained, Bartosz is enjoyable and infectious — an upbeat get together boy who occurs to function a 16-ton truck. He appears to have discovered one thing of their grueling existences that Étienne has by no means contemplated: the potential for pleasure in a tough and thankless world.

However because the requirements of their jobs start to push them farther aside, truckdriving turns into a critical impediment to their budding relationship. In Étienne’s case, it’s because his struggling firm lands a brand new contract with the U.Okay., requiring him to attend for hours, generally days, to cross over the border. For Bartosz, who works for a Polish agency undercutting their European competitors with low costs, it means driving to hell and again for a pittance of what Étienne makes, and with hardly any day off.

It’s almost unattainable for like to thrive beneath such situations, though in two memorable sequences Le Gall exhibits the way it can nonetheless rear its head in unlikely locations. The primary is when Étienne and Bartosz, who be in contact by way of telephone and CB radio, discover a technique to cross each other on a bridge as they head reverse methods, honking triumphantly and locking eyes for a split-second. Within the different, Étienne spots Bartosz’s rig on the large Rungis wholesale meals market outdoors Paris, chasing him down on foot and almost getting run over so he can drive him to hit the brakes.  

In his most disarming function but, the all the time participating Manenti, who broke by in 2019 because the crooked cop in Ladj Ly’s banlieue crime thriller Les Misérables, performs a kindhearted if downtrodden man who determined to simply accept his solitary existence a way back, then finds that his solely likelihood at escaping that life could also be crushingly taken away from him. Polish actor Swiezewski proves a worthy antidote to Manenti’s stolidness, bringing attraction and enthusiasm to their scenes collectively.

In dramas resembling this — each David Lean’s Temporary Encounter and Ang Lee’s clearly influential Brokeback Mountain come to thoughts — the would-be {couples} usually don’t keep collectively and normally one among them, or else love itself, winds up dying. With out making a gift of how Flesh and Gas ends, it’s value commending Le Gall for selecting a special route. The truth that he sees some hope in Étienne’s and Bartosz’s future shouldn’t be solely an indication of his romanticism. It’s a testomony to his perception that those that toil away at unforgiving jobs deserve their justifiable share of happiness, if they will simply take the correct exit ramp.