The automobile is one of the strangest spaces modern life has invented. Two people seated side by side, their eyes fixed on the same horizon, forced to share a confinement that can last for hours. Under those conditions, conversation takes on a texture of its own: people speak forward, toward the windshield, and that absence of eye contact allows for confessions that would be impossible face to face. Sebastian Brameshuber understood this condition and made it the guiding principle of London, which premiered at the Berlinale and won the Grand Prix at Cinéma du Réel.
The film rests on a fertile paradox. Its highway, the West Autobahn linking Vienna and Salzburg, is an image projected behind a motionless car inside a studio. Its performers are ordinary people who keep their own names and tell stories with the density of lived experience. Everything is artifice, and everything rings true. Brameshuber seems to be asking where the authenticity of an image lies, and his answer points to the spoken word: when someone tells something honestly, the set becomes transparent and what remains is the voice. In that sense, London extends a tradition running from Kiarostami to Panahi, that of the vehicle as a device for making the world speak.
And the world speaking here is Europe. The road works as a corridor through which the continent’s tensions circulate: the war in Ukraine, suddenly just a few days’ drive away; migrations that left fathers without a goodbye; sexual dissidents who still pay the price of distance from their families; ideologies that seek refuge in unlikely places, even in a Hollywood blockbuster read as an anticolonial manifesto. There is also a past that refuses to stay behind. The highway itself was conceived under Nazism, and the fact that a passenger marvels at its bridges reveals how deeply infrastructure carries memory. Every paved kilometer is also a historical document.
What makes the film singular is the figure of the driver. Bobby Sommer embodies a kind of listening that has grown rare in an age of constant opinion. He receives ideas that might irritate him with a hospitable serenity, and there is something profoundly political in that attitude: the conviction that the encounter with the other is worthwhile in itself, regardless of agreement. His age adds another layer. An older man who travels again and again to keep a sick friend company is someone who already knows the weight of loss and who, perhaps for that reason, has learned to pay attention. The emotional loyalty between men, a bond sustained over the years, is the secret heart beating beneath the debates.
Brameshuber also films with an evident cinephile awareness. The Third Man is evoked as the memory of another Vienna, one of ruins and black markets, and the reference invites us to consider how much has changed and how much endures in the city the film leaves behind in order to set itself in motion. Cinema, it seems to suggest, is also a journey best taken in company.
Toward the end, as the highway recedes into the fog and Lou Reed plays, London reveals its true subject: grief. Everything that came before—the voices, the stories, the detours—takes on retrospective meaning as preparation for a farewell. Traveling becomes, then, a way of rehearsing absence, of getting used to the fact that people get in, share a stretch of road, and get out. The road is life itself seen from the driver’s seat, and Brameshuber has the delicacy to show it without underlining, trusting the intelligence and sensitivity of the viewer.
