Flesh and Fuel

Two truckers grapple with long, lonely hours on the road in an unequal Europe of rife labour exploitation across state borders in French director Pierre Le Gall’s feature debut Flesh and Fuel, a tender gay romance in which love offers the ultimate salvation from capitalism’s brutalities. The film, which screens at the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg, premiered in Critics’ Week at Cannes, where it won the inaugural Queer Palm Revelation award. It is a relatively unadorned but affectingly earnest story of reconnection in an isolating modern world of economic pressures and lost community. Its blend of politically aware grit, as it shows the exhaustion of workers whose personal lives are consumed by punishing schedules, and simmering chemistry in an LGBTQ+ drama in which the solace of fantasy is explored and desire and companionship emerge as regenerating forces, promises wide festival appeal.

Etienne (Alexis Manenti) is a forty-something truck driver with a reticent manner and soulfully sad eyes, who has fallen into the same profession his father did before him, as a long-haul truck driver for a French shipping company. He’s well-liked at the firm, but the job gives him little time for much else, and his check-ins with his sister and nephew are usually via Facetime while on the road. Relationships are too much of a complication, when even daily self-care basics become a logistical issue when he is on the road, and snatching quick showers at gas stations. Physical closeness remains a yearning that he allows himself to pursue within the limitations of his professional routine, quelling his sexual desires through roadside stop-offs at a cruising site in the woods for chance hook-ups with men there by cover of night.

One evening, Etienne’s path crosses with Polish trucker Bartosz (Julian Swizewski), when both men narrowly escape arrest by police who have raided the cruising spot, where open-air hook-ups are outlawed. The attraction between the more outwardly gregarious Bartosz and Etienne is instant, in a film that celebrates and shows the steamier side of passion. It’s not long before a deeper compatibility becomes apparent. Both understand the somewhat clandestine nature of gay identity in the macho world of trucking, and the unique demands of road pressures and routines, and are soon looking forward to their regular chats.

Resentments also flare almost immediately over their differing circumstances, as Bartosz is enlisted as a cheap hire from Europe’s east for international stints, facing longer hours than Etienne for a fraction of the pay. Fantasy supersedes reality for time, as the men can barely even snatch a half-hour break with each other amid their gruelling and incompatible schedules, instead Facetiming from meal stops in different countries, or even waving from their cabs as they pass each other like proverbial ships in the night.

The half-light of evening encounters is given an almost mysterious quality of illicit and veiled adventure earlier in the film by DOP Antoine Cormier as cars whizz by in-between nowhere spaces. The woods take on a dreamlike quality, as Etienne closes his eyes and Bartosz voices an imagined meeting, which we see as a mesmeric, nighttime vision. Then it’s straight back to the cold and solitary reality of trucking — a burden that starts to seem increasingly futile.

The relationship plays out as a reckoning for Etienne. Hit by this lightning bolt as if shaken from a deep sleep of autopilot drudgery, he must re-evaluate his choices in life, and what he wants his future to look like. There is scant backstory or embellishment to this portrait of one humble search for existential meaning beyond earning a living, but the conventional romantic payoff to this otherwise very contemporary European tale is heartfelt and charming enough to buoy us along on the journey.

Director: Pierre Le Gall
Writers: Pierre Le Gall, Camille Perton, Martin Drouot
Editor: Xavier Sirven
Cinematographer: Antoine Cormier
Producer: Nicolas Blanc
Cast: Alexis Manenti, Julian Swiezewski, Armindo Alves De Sa, Julie Duclos, Bernard Debreyn
Music: Paul Sabin
Sound: Cedric Berger, Renaud Bajeux, Xavier Thieulin
Production companies: Ex Nihilo
Sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Mannheim-Heidelberg
In French, English, Polish
90 minutes