L’ Oiseau sans pattes

Valérianne Poidevin’s uncle is thrice “different from the others”: from the rest of the family, which has no other lorry driver in its bourgeois ranks; from his colleagues, very few of whom tune their cab radios to France Culture; from workers in general, who seldom prefer, as he does, to work part-time. By setting off in the cabin of his uncle’s lorry for an intimist road movie, the filmmaker tries out a tactical approach. His naive questions and his way of adapting to life in the sleeper-cabin and accepting his uncle’s sarcasm with a smile create, en route, a tenderly comic duo. On his days off at home, the uncle unveils the other side of his cabin: a bedroom-cum-library harbouring the aborted futures of his younger days as a drama student at the Cours Simon. The metaphoric “bird without legs” in Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending, in which he acted when he was twenty, infuses a light melancholy into this affectionate Two for the Road.