Jean-Luc Godard said all he needed to make a movie was a girl and a gun. With her terrific first feature, writer-director Anna Gutto demonstrates that all you need is Juliette Binoche driving a truck. And that’s just for starters. Despite its B-movie trappings, the crime drama Paradise Highway taps a deeper, more sinister vein in America, and proposes an encouraging and maybe even realistic network of crime-stoppers: our nation’s long-haul drivers.
A deglammed Binoche stars as Sally, a Canadian (to explain the accent) American trucker who’s getting ready to make one more haul before she picks up her brother Dennis (Frank Grillo), who’s finishing up a stint in jail. The problem is, when Sally collects her cargo, it turns out to be 12-year old girl Leila (Hala Finley), just one of many young pawns caught in an inter-state sex-trafficking ring. Sally refuses the job at first, but the girl’s handlers warn they could make things hard for her brother Dennis, so the trucker reluctantly goes on with it. Then at the drop-off point, Leila coolly blows away her prospective buyer with a shotgun. Meanwhile, a grizzled FBI agent (Morgan Freeman) who’s spent decades trying to track down these harrowing cases is on the job, trying to figure out if Sally is dangerous—or if she’s really on the law’s side.
It all sounds like a sensationalistic genre piece, and garish poster art that seems one step removed from a three wolf-moon t-shirt is not promising. You might wonder what drew Binoche to what looks like sub-par material? But the cause is a dear one, and this isn’t the straight-to-video cheapie that it may appear to be.
From the first frames, there’s a different vibe here. Anné Kulonen’s guitar-heavy score, playing against drone shots of two-lane blacktop and an early scene where Sally is visiting Dennis in prison, is more than a little reminiscent of Paris Texas, and that resonance says a lot about Sally’s character. On the one hand: she’s Juliette Binoche! But on the other hand, she’s clearly alienated, and though she has her disembodied support group in the form of a roving teleconference call among fellow female truckers (a crucial plot point), she feels most at home on the open road, and there’s a reason for that—the very reason she connects with Leila.
And while Paradise gets its drama from endangered children, and the frustrations of the people trying to protect them, the movie gets a lot of its drive, so to speak, from a simple and simply compelling visual: the sight of a huge semi barreling down that eponymous highway. Put halfway decent music with this kind of truck footage, much of it accomplished by well-placed drones (the technology gets a chance to really show off in one particular heaven-ascending shot), and put Juliette Binoche behind the wheel; and you’ve got yourself a movie.
A few decades ago, Binoche was the reigning arthouse queen, her roles for the most part the definition of late 20th-century winsome. But in recent years she has embraced less glamorous roles, a process that perhaps reached its peak in the uncomfortably candid High Life. Still, she’s one of the last actors you’d expect to see as a truck driver, and if her accent and backstory seems like a stretch for a few seconds, she’s totally believable as Sally, selling her character’s conflict and strength. After this compelling crime drama, you’d follow her rig anywhere. Her supporting cast is just as good, with Gutto getting good performances out of everyone from young Finlay to the veteran Freeman, who could be perfectly excused for sleepwalking through this role—but he doesn’t.
Paradise Highway runs just under two hours, but if it feels like a longer ride, that’s not a bad thing; this movie makes you feel like you’ve been somewhere. It’s not always a pleasant trip, but it was well worth the journey.
Photo courtesy of Lionsgate
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