James Y. Lee
When you’re not trying to evade traffic-light-illiterate drivers, or getting frustrated at the fourth piece of lane-altering construction you’re encountering along a lengthy commute, the act of driving is capable of reaching meditative levels of serenity. Consider how surreal it is to relinquish control of your bodily movement to a metal box on wheels going at unreasonable speeds, competing for space with other metal boxes. How strange it is that our directionless lives can be reasonably filtered out on lines drawn for you, on a fixed path that lies ahead. How oddly intimate it is that the car is a closed enough space where, even as expanses of nature and stationary fixtures of civilization can pass us by in seconds, a car becomes the only world we know, which we share only among those inside it. Countless filmmakers have tapped into this transportational serenity; Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Bette Gordon and James Benning… and Iranians are certainly aware of it, if your sample size is restricted to Taste of Cherry or Taxi. So, too, it seems now, are the Austrians. Sebastian Brameshuber’s new film, London, reads like a more modest riff on the aforementioned Kiarostami masterwork, with a more wide-ranging focus on a rotating cast of passengers and one constant driver as a microcosm for the routines of contemporary Europe.
The driver at the helm of London‘s car is Bobby (Bobby Sommer), a man of somewhat older age traveling between Vienna and Salzburg, and driving along the historic West Autobahn freeway, to frequently visit Arthur, an ailing comatose friend of his in the hospital. Every time he goes to and from, he manages to pick up a couple of passengers in need of a ride along the way; London is made exclusively of those encounters, various and numerous in nature, over the course of the film’s two hours. Bobby is not on an existential mission like Mr. Badii, nor does he do this professionally like Jafar Panahi once attempted. On a formal level, the exclusive narrative focus on driving lends the film to a kind of stillness and consistency without much need for overbearing dramatic tension or structural change. Every so often, yes, we do see Bobby exit the car—often at a rest stop, filling gas, or grabbing a meal—but these are often silent interludes, dead air that the primary scenes in his car are designed to fill.
Two things about the production of this film are likely to be sources of some astonishment. The first is that the passengers Bobby picks up are non-professional actors, and almost all of the dialogue they share is improvised. The second is that the car is on a set; it is not actually driving down the West Autobahn, which instead is portrayed via projection techniques outside of the car’s windows. For the latter, you’re not likely to even remember this fact, because whatever techniques Brameshuber’s crew used are so convincing that you’d believe that they managed to find a way to stick three stationary cameras in a car that could film cleanly while the car was driving. Already knowing the former fact, however, is likely to stick with you the most throughout your viewing experience of London. It’s particularly relevant for the first half of the film, which serves as a kind of variety hour for the European passengers that Bobby picks up, before the second act pivots into something more narratively directional.
London likely wouldn’t feel as charming for its first stretch if it were entirely scripted, which moves from encounter to encounter with exactly the kind of itinerant fluidity someone like Bobby would experience, forging brief moments of vulnerability with people he’s unlikely to ever see again. A screenwriter’s more rigorous instincts would likely trend too often towards the thematically relevant, each of these conversations clearly being a piece of a greater puzzle, one that London knows it can uncover naturally just by the mere act of accumulating these encounters. The end result is a film where a soldier’s moral disillusionment with the national ideals he serves can coexist with someone’s Marxist critical analysis of James Cameron’s Avatar—and a surprisingly sound one, at that—all in service of a greater atmosphere. But as if to point out the fact that the subject material each passenger talks about might not be the most interesting thing about them, the most fascinating to watch is Bobby’s drive with a nervous Romanian woman who struggles to talk with Bobby in any language, and is also separately fighting for attention on a phone call, but is still visibly grateful for his help all the same.
The most critical mistake that Brameshuber’s film would have made is the omission of any meaningful detail about Bobby, or what about the serenity of this routine is so attractive for him, even on a subconscious level. Rest assured; that error is nowhere to be seen in London. The magic trick of this film is how it probes into the fact that the car is a somewhat unique space for unexpected moments of vulnerability, and just as much as his passengers are willing to share details about themselves, so is Bobby, even early on in the film. Among the first things we learn is his family history; namely that of his father, who worked as a mailman and was unable to articulate the terror he suffered on the frontlines of the Second World War. And as London makes its way towards the second half of its runtime, we grow to understand the depth of the guilt Bobby feels over Arthur and his coma—first through a run-in with another mutual friend whose car’s broken down, and then with a self-proclaimed “hopeless romantic” who quizzes him on if he’s ever experienced a love or a connection of real depth. “Maybe he doesn’t care at all,” Bobby mutters, as he wonders out loud if Arthur is able to hear the things Bobby says to him, a devastating observation of a friendship that deteriorated on a spiritual level before it then broke on a physical one.
War remains perpetually on the backdrop of London‘s mind as well, not just with the story of Bobby’s father, or the soldier that he picks up at the very beginning of the film. Arthouse filmmaker Ted Fendt (himself premiering a film of his, Foreign Travel, at this year’s NYFF) shows up here in an extended cameo of sorts, as a passenger guiding Bobby through the Nazi history of the West Autobahn, and how the highway is irreconcilably caught up in the harrowing intentions of fascist aesthetics and design. One of Bobby’s last passengers is a queer Yugoslav woman, still carrying the memories of the ethnic conflicts and genocides that erupted in the region throughout the 1990s, about to enter a marriage that she knows her parents will oppose. Another one of his passengers is evading Putin’s invasion of Ukraine with the rest of her family, which dovetails all of this conversation about history, conflict, and its implications for the future in quietly stirring fashion, straight into the present day, and how everlasting Europe’s reckoning with war seems to be. Whatever considerations about history that Brameshuber’s film invites, they are all inevitably in service of these passengers trying to make sense of the conflict-laden times they exist in now. Their scars, their hopes, their fears, unfurl in the confession box that is Bobby’s car.
It’s ultimately Sommer’s soft-spoken performance that inevitably becomes the grounding force of this film, his grief and guilt over Arthur becoming an anchor for his vulnerability, and also morphing Bobby into an odd breed of a saint. You also get the sense that if most of the dialogue in this film is improvised, then surely Sommer is bringing something real of his own to Bobby as a character, parts of his history or his lived reality that he carries into the car in his own right. In that sense, the range of confessions contained in Bobby’s car expands to something far more universal than expected: one where emotional exposure is invited even in the construction of London, not just restricted to the confines of its narrative. The vulnerability Sommer shows demonstrates something magical contained in the act of driving—its privacy, its speed, its focus only on the road ahead, its transportive reach to anywhere we choose—that then becomes an analog for how we move through cultural identity and history. Wherever the course of Europe’s history may lead, Brameshuber’s film seems to think, it is only capable of moving forward, piercing through the fog of the unknown, towards a destination not unlike Arthur for Bobby—full of guilt, vulnerability, and reminders of the past, but a destination that it will still surely return to again and again.
