CINEMASOPHY: A Dialogue of Eras — May Films
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The central theme of this edition of the Cinemasophy column is the road. In cinema, it is always a metaphor — of choice, escape, return, search, or predestination… Films dedicated to the theme of the road (commonly referred to as road movies) are always invitations. Yet, at the end of the journey, the characters are not necessarily met with paradise, home, or a great reward. Sometimes, the road leads nowhere. Sometimes — in circles.
It’s no coincidence that the great Federico Fellini named one of his finest films — telling the story of two outcast circus performers with the faces of Giulietta Masina and Anthony Quinn — La Strada (1954). Fellini’s road is full of sharp truths and moral lessons. Small figures drag themselves along the black-and-white landscapes in a shabby motor van, awaiting inevitable misfortunes. Two of the films featured in this column follow roads across the two Americas — South and North — portrayed as realms of eternal wanderers.
THE WAGES OF FEAR (LE SALAIRE DE LA PEUR, FRANCE, ITALY, 1953)
Director: Henri-Georges Clouzot
Starring: Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Véra Clouzot
This great French thriller, based on the novel of the same name by Georges Arnaud, secures its place in the history of world cinema with scenes so suspenseful they verge on unbearable. Here, the road is a nerve, a lifeline, desperation, danger, an explosion vanishing deep into the landscape without a trace, a premonition of the inevitable and the terrifying.
The plot follows four desperate, destitute foreigners stranded in a Guatemalan backwater who accept a suicidal mission: to drive two rusty trucks loaded with volatile nitroglycerin across a winding dirt road through the mountains to a burning oil well. The job is commissioned by a major North American oil corporation. The price of life — the wages of fear — is two thousand U.S. dollars.
On the visual level, French director Clouzot seems to engage in a polemic with American Westerns: here are the themes of the little man and vast American landscapes — even if those of Latin America. But unlike the classic Westerns, the antagonist here is not a person but circumstance itself — a torturous, winding journey of 300 deadly miles. The protagonist is the arrogant Corsican Mario (Yves Montand in his first dramatic role), who dreams of returning home to France, a dream kept alive by a carefully preserved Paris metro ticket.
Free from studio conventions, Clouzot draws out the exposition, introducing us to unwashed, intense men who clash and compete for the rarest of commodities in these parts: work. Then comes everything that makes this film worth rewatching time and again: the four men, trapped in the claustrophobic cabins of stinking old trucks, must compete with the machines themselves — trucks that seem to awaken with disturbingly anthropomorphic traits.
They tilt precariously on a wooden, half-rotten bridge, then get stuck in a giant oil slick — close-ups of wheels, bumpers, and winches dominate the screen, testing our nerves. In the back of each truck, tanks of nitroglycerin roll steadily — ready to explode at any moment. But that’s not all. The meticulous Clouzot saw the dynamic between characters as a near-essential component of suspense. He masterfully heightens the tension between the men, whose fear pushes them to the brink of tearing each other apart.
The American success of The Wages of Fear, along with his equally powerful Les Diaboliques (1955), was akin to the detonation of nitroglycerin itself. For a time, Frenchman Clouzot became the reigning king of suspense cinema in the 1950s, momentarily dethroning none other than Alfred Hitchcock. According to legend, it was The Wages of Fear that later prompted Hitchcock to rethink his own style — paring down the psychology, limiting the runtime to under 90 minutes — and eventually led him to create the iconic two-hour masterpiece Vertigo.
As for Clouzot, paradoxically, he laid the groundwork for a quintessentially American genre: the vehicular thriller. And it is to him that we owe a debt for the very existence of such renowned films as Howard W. Koch’s The Devil’s Hairpin (1958), a young Spielberg’s Duel (1971), William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977), Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978), Menahem Golan’s Over the Top (1987), Kevin Hooks’ Black Dog (1998), and Jonathan Hensleigh’s The Ice Road (2021).
NOMADLAND (USA, 2020)
Director: Chloé Zhao
Starring: Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May
Chloé Zhao’s road leads into the quintessentially North American landscape — with its flares of sunsets and sunrises, rocky mountains, massive hollow boulders, and cracked earth. The characters who step onto these roads become metaphors of waiting, gradually losing their own sense of self. The road in Nomadland — crowned with the Golden Lion in Venice and three Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress for Frances McDormand) — is the interval between “what was” and “what will be”.
It is the pure, elusive space of the present moment. A perfect path for those seeking balance. A plunge into contemplation. Like Fern, the main character, brilliantly portrayed by Frances McDormand. She is pushed onto the road by circumstances and by the quiet call of the soul: first, her husband dies, then her small hometown — poignantly named Empire — ceases to exist.
Left without work, Fern embarks on a journey across America, living in her van and taking up seasonal jobs — harvesting beets and packing goods for Amazon. Fern has no destination. Her mission is to become a portal for other people, a medium through which their stories can be told.
And so, Fern’s story becomes the story of all those she encounters: lonely outcasts, last heroes, rebels, wandering singers drifting across the vast country in their small homes on wheels — doomed, yet optimistic, joyful, and sorrowful. Above all, they are vividly alive because all of them were cast by Zhao from real life; on screen, they do not act — they live.
And Frances McDormand, shedding the “method” she learned in acting school, lives alongside them, listening intently to the stories of nomadic life. An ideal avatar for the viewer, she relies not on powerful dramatic tools but on minimal gestures and subtle eye movements to convey both the bitterness of solitude and the joy of freedom her character experiences.
Ordinary people have always been her domain. Frances McDormand’s filmography is full of them — from the brave housewife Mrs. Pell in Mississippi Burning (1988) and the pregnant police officer Marge in Fargo (1996) to the fearless Mildred Hayes in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). But what matters most is this: through her performances, these “little people” become giants — individuals who, in their own way, make America truly great. And that, among other things, is what Nomadland is about.
Fern, like the people around her, doesn’t see herself as homeless. First, because all of them ultimately form a scattered family across the vastness of America. And second, as Frances McDormand puts it: “I am not homeless, I am houseless”. She has no home in the traditional sense — of brick and concrete — because her new home is the natural landscape of the New World, along with a battered van and a childlike openness that allows her to perceive the true poetry of this eternal nature.
Nomadland continues the great American tradition of journeying — one that began with the first European settlers, then continued with frontier explorers, cowboys, drifters, and victims of the Great Depression, and was later mythologized by American cinema. In the second half of the 20th century, the road movie genre took shape as the rebels of New Hollywood, easy riders, flower children, beatniks, and midnight cowboys set out in search of identity.
Nomadland portrays another America — one not yet recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, shaken by the reforms introduced by Barack Obama at the close of his first presidential term. The capitalist system is trembling. The heroes of this difficult era are new seekers — displaced, unhappy souls crisscrossing the country in search of work, of shelter, of a better life.
Yet Chloé Zhao never allows her film to slip into journalistic social drama. With a refined cinematic language and a timeless, achingly sentimental gaze, she elevates Nomadland to a metaphysical level of poetic cinema, an exploration of the central American myths — a heartfelt attempt to understand how exactly the famed American dream has transformed.
Dreamlike and guided by an elusive logic — almost like jazz improvisation — Nomadland is one of the most powerful and simultaneously soothing cinematic reflections ever made. Not just about contemporary America, but about the road, about eternity, and about the human being within it.
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