Traveling beyond the national: mobile citizenship, flexible identities, and layered republicanism in the French return road movie

Abstract

The road movie has recently become an increasingly popular vehicle for French and European filmmakers attempting to come to terms with the complexities of contemporary identity within New Europe and a postcolonial world. This article considers the ways by which one notable sub-category of French road cinema, the road movie, opens the door to a reading of contemporary identity as a concept not strictly delimited by the geographic boundaries of the nation state. At the same time, identity in these films is not aligned with the ethnic or cultural origins of the protagonists. The article identifies twenty films that make up the return road movie corpus and offers a closer reading of two notable examples, Voyage en Armenie/Armenia (Robert Guediguian, 2006) and Ten'ja/Testament (Hassan Legzouli, 2004). These films use mobility to demonstrate that it is conceivable to be French and retain, or rediscover, a connection to another identity. By formulating contemporary identity as both incongruous with th...