London

Bobby drives back and forth between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers along the way and sharing conversations that drift from the everyday to the deeply personal. In this tender portrait of today’s Europe, anonymity and warmth still go hand in hand.

The garage that served as the main setting for Sebastian Brameshuber’s previous film, Movements of a Nearby Mountain (Grand Prix Cinéma du Réel, 2019), might be conceptualised as a studio, and its owner an actor, fashioning scenes as he repairs cars. While a few car trip sequences allow for tracking shots, the transcontinental nature of his second-hand car business placed the film within a broader context of globalised economic exchange. Brameshuber initially seems to reverse this relationship in London, with car rides become the apparent focus of the film. But this shift is misleading: they were shot in a studio. The car therefore becomes a new cinematic apparatus, buoyed by the illusion of mobility. 

The relationship between cinema and the road is well known. Think of Ten (Kiarostami), The United States of America(Benning and Gordon) or The Plains (Easteal): all experiences in which the inside of a car shapes both the perception of the landscape and conversational flow. The atmosphere surrounding Bobby’s Range Rover, on the other hand, belongs entirely to Brameshuber’s cinema. A careful arrangement of cameras, alternating between shot-reverse shots and views through the windshield, leaves plenty of space for long dialogues based on hours of semi-improvised conversations with non-actors. The result is calm and concentrated, a form of attention and thoughtfulness in which interpersonal exchanges push reality towards an extraordinary lucidity. Little by little, the inside of the car becomes a shelter in which introspection mingles with reflection and hospitality—a crucial notion in the temporal space of the highway, at both ends of which fascist ideologies loom large. Within a landscape that authoritatively frames perception and organises flow, Europe’s contradictions are thrown into relief. The car, a motionless capsule at the heart of the general movement, becomes a discreet but powerful fly in the ointment.

Antoine Thirion