Travelling Beyond the National: Mobile Citizenship and Flexible Identities in French-Language Return Road Movies
This chapter examines what is likely the increasingly prevalent ‘return to origins’ movie. A close look at the corpus of French-language road cinema of the past twenty years reveals a genre that actively reformulates the limits of national and European identity by (often literally) redrawing the map. The popularity of ‘return’ voyages is reflective of a desire to remap French and other national identities within the parameters of an enlarged European Union, within which physical and administrative frontiers have fallen. Return films demonstrate that it is now conceivable to be French, Belgian or Swiss and retain, or rediscover, a connection to another identity, whether Polish, Czech, Armenian, Spanish, Italian, or Maghrebi. The chapter begins with a discussion of how mobile and layered outlooks on citizenship fit into conception of French republicanism and European identity frameworks before zooming in on case studies from France and Switzerland. Voyage en Arménie/Armenia (Robert Guédiguian, 2006, France), Ten’ja/Testament (Hassan Legzouli, 2004, France/Morocco) and Comme des voleurs (à l'est)/Stealth (Lionel Baier, 2005, Switzerland) furnish the examples.