Screened at the 65th Critics’ Week and featured in the Special Screenings section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Pierre Le Gall’s Flesh and Fuel is set within the often unseen world of European truck drivers. The film depicts the exhausting pace of life on the road and the emotional emptiness that can grow within it.

Étienne, played brilliantly by Alexis Manenti, lives almost entirely inside his truck. His days are measured by schedules, loading docks, motorway lights, and anonymous rest stops. Le Gall understands the strange contradiction of this life: truck drivers are constantly moving, yet emotionally they often remain stuck in isolation. The road becomes a path of freedom and prison. Étienne’s existence has become a routine, and by avoiding attachment through brief encounters, he thinks he is happy.

Then Bartosz arrives, played with extraordinary unpredictability by Julian Świeżewski. Bartosz is free-spirited, playful yet vulnerable; he completely changes the run of the story. The chemistry between the two actors is astonishing. Their relationship grows through intimacy, laughter, and conversation, whether in Bartosz’s broken French or English.

Le Gall is brilliant in the way he shows labour itself; the trucks are central to the film as well. The film pays close attention to the texture of their existence: the hiss of brakes, fluorescent truck stops, cramped cabins, motorway coffee, unloading schedules, and radio chatter. There is dignity in the detail, and Le Gall films working-class life with enormous respect, never looking down on it either.

The road consumes the trackers’ time, their bodies, and often their personal lives. The handheld camerawork keeps us trapped inside the cabins with them, emphasising how small their world can become despite travelling across entire countries. The love story itself is sensual and refreshingly honest. The intimacy between Étienne and Bartosz is tender, something cinema often forgets when portraying masculinity. Yes, their relationship feels awkward, joyful, physical, and human all at once. In many ways, the film is about two men briefly escaping the emotional machinery that surrounds them.

However, underneath the romance lies something sad: the understanding that lives built entirely around work often leave very little room for love. The loneliness of the trucker’s existence hangs over every scene. These are people constantly surrounded by movement, yet emotionally detached from the world they help keep alive. The film asks how much of ourselves we sacrifice simply to survive.

Flesh and Fuel is a romance and a social drama; it is also a compassionate portrait of people who spend their lives in transit, moving the demands of modern life across borders while struggling to hold onto their own humanity. Undoubtedly, Pierre Le Gall has created a superb film full of emotional truth.

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Written by Maggie Gogler

Featured image courtesy of Cannes Film Festival

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