Nameless Love on the Highway

Contemporary feature films now rarely go without lavishly augmented sound and image worlds: a door slamming shut with a thunderous boom, or the sight of expansive landscapes whose sheer perfection, even upon closer inspection, raises eyebrows, have long since become cinema’s standard fare.

If a new film, by contrast, does away with those technical aids that serve cinematic perfection on a silver platter, confusion is almost guaranteed. As with “London,” the feature debut of Austrian director Sebastian Brameshuber.

The Imperfect as a Virtue

The film is, in many ways, an imperfect work: straightforward camerawork sits alongside a near-total abstention from the usual showiness and artificial emotional escalation. Why, one might ask at first. The answer is as simple as it is obvious: because the film trusts its plot and its characters.

It tells the story of 72-year-old Bobby, who regularly travels from Vienna, his home, to Salzburg to visit his friend Arthur, who lies in a hospital there. To avoid shouldering the expensive gas costs alone, the pensioner uses an app to find fellow travelers who will join him on his journeys through the Austrian hinterland.

Bobby is a discreet, yet curious man. And so he quickly strikes up conversations with his companions: with a young man serving in the army who is haunted by nightmares at night. Or with a young woman whose greatest role model is her older sister—not despite, but precisely because they have had frequent major arguments that they’ve managed to mend time and time again. Then he is joined by a communist student who regards “Avatar” as an “unwilling Marxist masterwork.” Bobby listens a lot and comments little.

Rendered So Close to Life

And the more Bobby listens, the more he opens up about himself and his initially hazy, sketchy relationship with Arthur. For instance, he lately sat at Arthur’s bedside and played “I’m Waiting For My Man” — the homoerotic classic by The Velvet Underground from 1967. The two men’ relationship isn’t reduced to a single label by the end. Like a veil of melancholy, it hangs over the film.

Precisely the unusually slow narrative pace, combined with recurring breaths and pauses for thought, in contrast to the usual turbo-fast dialogue, gradually reveals an astonishingly strong pull. The characters and stories that unfold feel almost lived-in. This is undoubtedly partly due to the film straddling fiction and documentary without committing to a single stance. For example, Bobby is played by Bobby Sommer, an Austrian musician.

In an era when divisions are foregrounded, Brameshuber has recently stated that his aim was to make a film “that emphasizes what we have in common.” He achieves this with “London” in a virtually masterful fashion.