EXILS

Searching for their history, the main characters of Exils hit the road for home. Hollywood’s highway is littered with road movies. The American Dream in film has been mobilized by car culture, its rebel heroes enthralled by the lure of the asphalt horizon, the freedom of finding oneself while always moving on, and the pursuit of happiness just around the next bend. But beyond the well-paved paths of the Tinseltown version, directors like Walter Salles have carved a career out of very different kinds of road movies. Central Station was about leaving behind what you’ve found as much as reaching the bittersweet end of the road, while The Motorcycle Diaries followed Che Guevara’s bumpy route to political revolutionary. (Little surprise, then, that Salles has been brought in to film Coppola’s long-held rights to an adaptation of that iconic and iconoclastic American classic, Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.) There’s also French director Tony Gatlif, whose own rather beatnik, scruffy take on the roving life of the traveller, Exils, is a vibrant, luscious travelogue that will have you gladly surrendering to its offbeat rhythm. Gatlif is best known as a chronicler of those peripatetic people, the Gypsies (Gadjo Dilo, Swing), but here he looks at two Franco-Arabs, Zano (Romain Duris) and Naïma (Lubna Azabal), who decide to return to their homeland. Most road movies offer an extensive preamble before setting off, but here, after the camera pulls back from the textured map of Zano’s naked back and we see Naïma frolicking in bed to the political rap echoing around his Paris apartment, Zano asks, “Wanna go to Algeria?” Moments later, they’re off and we’re tagging along for the joyful ride. Zano and Naïma cavort sensually en route, washing each other’s hair, drinking water from leaves and generally roughing it with a wild, erotic energy; the film exudes a tactile sensuality as fingers trace skin, peel an orange, or strum out a beat. And there’s always music: Naïma dances recklessly to a tune in a soccer field, Zano listens to techno on headphones as he picks fruit, the couple watch Flamenco in Seville, and the film’s penultimate scene is a 10-minute, orgasmic rush of trilling and drumming in a sweltering, pulsating room somewhere in Algiers. Cinematographer Céline Bozon gives us visual road poetry, offering luminous, starkly framed shots of the French and Spanish countrysides or long, telescopic views of highways and fields. Zano and Naïma share an irrepressibly raucous, raunchy spirit, and Gatlif imbues the film with a bohemian, counter-culture energy that never lessens when the film enters North Africa. West and East simply have their own, different methods of restraint and release, he suggests. On this cross-cultural, two-way trek, the nomadic pair meets an Algerian brother and sister, Leïla (Leïla Makhlouf) and Habib (Habib Cheik) who are travelling to Paris. Zano and Naïma do seasonal work in an orchard for extra money among illegal workers, then sneak onto the wrong boat to get across to North Africa. Once in Morocco, the camera takes in the dusty, austere landscape and the film becomes overwhelmed by people: crowds of earthquake survivors searching for a safer haven, long queues of Algerians outside shops or at taxi stands, and a throng assembled to listen and dance to musicians’ throbbing beats. Underneath Zano’s and Naïma’s fiery, stormy relationship, though, lay some painful scars. Zano, orphaned by a car accident, is returning to Algiers to see his family’s home, while Naïma seems to have been pimped off as a teenager and has never been taught Arabic—“I’m a stranger everywhere,” she says. In the film’s elegiac final scene, music links past and present as the pair move on, still trying to recover themselves. Exils, with its snapshots of life in perpetual motion, is a road movie stripped to its existential core. But Gatlif’s film is also about taking a trip back home and realizing that the future isn’t just a far-off, rosy horizon, but a distant place you can only struggle towards after revisiting your past haunts and present troubles, after reconciling yourself with your ancestry and tradition. Written and directed by Tony Gatlif Starring Romain Duris and Lubna Azabal

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