On Tuesday at 2220 Arts & Archives on Beverly Blvd. in Los Angeles, Acropolis Cinema presented a screening of Sebastian Brameschuber’s new film London. Brameschuber is an Austrian filmmaker has been praised for his subtle storytelling and interesting dramaturgy. The protagonist of London is 72-year-old Bobby, who drives back and forth on the motorway between Vienna and Salzburg almost every week. Bobby shuttles between Vienna and Salzburg, picking up strangers. Their conversations range from casual to intimate, revealing how anonymous connections create warmth in modern Europe. The reason for these regular car journeys is Bobby’s friend, Arthur, who is in a coma in a hospital in Salzburg following a stroke.
To save on fuel costs, Bobby often gives lifts to strangers and starts to talk to them during the long drives. In these conversations, which range from superficial small talk to more profound topics, the elderly gentleman not only talks about himself, his youth, growing older and his friend Arthur, but also gets to know real people with very different stories. These include a soldier who questions the meaning of war; a young queer woman about to get married; and a woman who was left behind by the bus at a petrol station. It also includes running in Cliff, a 30-something Nigerian immigrant, whose car has broken down near a town along the Autobahn and Bobby has met before.
The film is calm and discreet, subtle and warm, similar to the character of the pensioner Bobby (played by Bobby Sommer) whom we observe during the frequent drives between Vienna and Salzburg, while carpooling passengers take turns in the passenger seat. The film is built upon a road movie trope but is chunked out into short segments with different passengers in a form somewhat akin today’s short internet format. This genre of film has been seen in notable documentaries, hybrids and feature films such as Kiarostami’s “Ten” (2002), Knight’s “Locke” (2013), Panahi’s “Taxi” (2015) or Maciek Hamela’s “In the Rearview” (2023). The “talking film” format is somewhat reminiscent of the later work of Portuguese auteur Manoel de Oliveira. The use of a car driving creates limitations on what can be shot and forces the director to push conversation to the forefront in such a film.
Brameshuber explained at the Q&A after the screening that he utilized a visual syntax that relies on three basic elements: Driver’s seat, passenger’s seat and foreground (view through the windshield). The film was shot in a studio sound stage using preshot footage of the highway between Vienna and Salzburg at various times of the year and different seasons. Brameshuber explained that he filmed the passenger first (which were mostly actors) and then filmed Bobby the driver, with prompts as to the conversations so the conversations could be reconstructed in the editing process.
The decision to shoot the shots and counter shots, independent of the foregrounds, in the studio. Devoid of noise, interspersed with silence and undisturbed by the hum of the engine, the conversational scenes seem like intimate friendly or family conversations instead of rushed conversations.
With this setup, Brameshuber establishes the car as a capsule in motion, a kind of studio on wheels. The conversations take place in an unreal, artificial object in a state of weightlessness, outside of which non-places and landscapes along the West Autobahn may or may not appear. In longer or shorter segments, we listen to the individual stories of travelers, as a rule intertwined with socio-political circumstances, primarily migrations and wars.
A young man named Paul who is finishing up his military service talks about his fear of actual war. One girl talks about her family who escaped the war in Ukraine; the second about his activism in the territory of former Yugoslavia, disagreement with his parents, queer identity and upcoming wedding; the young Marxist came from Albanian immigration about his partisan grandfather. A young woman from Romania can neither speak German or English, and begs Bobby for a ride in the rain to a nearby town where she hopes to catch the bus to Brussels, where she has a job waiting. Almost all the vignettes, based on the real experiences of the actors, are made convincing by the very choice of the protagonists, as well as their humanity, fragility and the respect felt between them and Bobby.
Eventually we come to understand the title of the film “London,” which is where Bobby lived for ten happy years with his father as a youngster. In the course of the film, more is revealed about Bobby’s life as he volunteers more information with each passenger and their shared experiences. The fragmentary conversations build a mosaic picture of today’s Europe as an area in constant mutation and marked by past (Yugoslavia), present (Ukraine) and possibly future conflicts (a colonel of the Austrian army on the radio comments on the possibility of the war in Ukraine spreading to Central Europe).
The landscapes surrounding Bobby’s vehicle draw attention to the rootedness of the situations in Austria’s past and present. The highway connecting Vienna and Salzburg was mostly built by the sNazis, but in such a way that it offers a panoramic view of the impressive nature and magnificent buildings, such as the Benedictine Opatija in Melk. In “London”, this endeavor is highlighted in the segment with the researcher whom Bobby takes to the Staatsbrücke Bridge near Salzburg built during the Nazi era. By highlighting the context, the film indicates the way in which the perception of space there is still conditioned by the Nazi obsession with grandiosity.
His conversation with the young woman from the Ukraine is especially revealing because she is psychologist and asks more probing questions about love and relationships. Bobby reveals why he returns to Salzburg on an almost weekly basis – to visit his old friend Arthur who is in a coma in the hospital there. As the scenes unfold, the puzzle comes together more clearly: Bobby’s father has been mobilized by the Nazis; Bobby has never married, has no children, and apparently regrets some decisions made out of fear of responsibility. The Bobby-mirror begins to reflect in his companions: his successive passengers, the oldest of whom are in their thirties, line up as younger versions of him, possible stages of Bobby’s life up to the age of 30.
All of Bobby’s younger passengers seem to provide a sense of hope about the future. Bobby’s long-ago stay in London – a symbol of youthful freedom, rebelliousness and cosmopolitanism, and a possible turning point in life, which obviously did not lead him in the desired direction – and his quiet regret for his long-broken friendship with Arthur, with whom he played and shared a passion for The Velvet Underground. Through the windshield, the highway is filmed through the rear window, and the music from the youth of the two friends – “Pale Blue Eyes” – penetrates the car as a symptom of what lingers on despite the separation.
In the Q&A, director Brameschuber revealed that has had the idea of making a film like this since 2014 based on his own experience as a college-age student of taking car rides with strangers from Vienna to Berlin, when he was once in relationship with a person in Berlin. He combined his own interest in the way we share intimacy with complete strangers knowing that we will probably never see that person again.
