Journey Within: Exploring Life & Love Through Classic Travel Films

In "Happy Together" (1997), directed by Wong Kar-wai, two gay men from Hong Kong—Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-Fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai)—travel to Argentina to see the Iguazu Falls. Their voyage, however, ends in disaster and disappointment: They run out of money and break up. Despite several attempts to reconcile, their relationship is marred; yet, through all their troubles in a foreign land, where they are stranded, Ho and Lai fantasise about the Iguazu Falls, a metonym of sorts, a signifier of the possibilities of travel, love, and fulfilment that constantly eludes them.

From Homer's epic "Odyssey," written around the 8th century BC, the story of a remarkable journey undertaken by Odysseus from Troy to his homeland Ithaca, to Sinbad's adventures in the "Arabian Nights" to our contemporary narratives, humans have written almost obsessively about travel, real or imaginary.

The roots of cinema, too, are intricately related to travel.

Casablanca: A Place Of Greater Safety

As wars raged worldwide from Ukraine to Gaza, the American Film Institute (AFI) named the Hollywood classic "Casablanca" the greatest war film ever. Released only a year after the US entry into the Second World War and set in Casablanca on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, the film's appeal owes much to the conflict it portrays.

American expatriate Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) runs the Café Américain in Casablanca. He claims to be disinterested in politics and the conflict tearing Europe apart — "Your business is politics; mine is running a saloon." The reason for his cynicism is Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), with whom he had a relationship in Paris before she jilted him on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the French capital.

When Ilsa appears at the café, Rick learns she is married to Czech resistance leader Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), whom she had considered dead while trying to escape from a concentration camp during her meeting with Rick in Paris. But, on learning that he was alive, she had to return to Victor, abandoning Rick. Now, Rick uses all his influence in the city to help Victor and Ilsa escape the clutches of the Nazis.

Another haven for Rick and Ilsa's romance is Paris, where the two met and had a brief and happy sojourn. Towards the end of the film, Rick convinces Ilsa to escape from Casablanca and tells her: "We'll always have Paris." One of the most famous dialogues of the film, which has some of the most famous words spoken on the screen—it immediately infuses Paris's metonymic powers, much like Iguazu Falls in "Happy Together." Though Rick and Ilsa cannot have a happily ever after, they will always have a secure past.

It is almost an inversion of the most common promise of Hollywood romance—of the couple riding into the sunset. But at the same time, by locating Rick and Ilsa's happy time together in the past, it is given an eternal quality, much like the city of Paris, which has over centuries fashioned itself as the "city of love."

Midnight in Paris: Through The Rabbit Hole

An eternal city and the promise of eternal love—it's the stuff of cinematic dreams. Hollywood fell in love with Paris in its youth. From "An American in Paris" (1951) and "Paris When It Sizzles" (1963) to "Before Sunset" (2004), few Hollywood film crews have been able to resist the urge to decamp to the French capital. But the one film about Paris that has always fascinated me is "Midnight in Paris" (2011), written and directed by Woody Allen. Even better is the narrative tool of time travel it employs to recreate many Parises—from the 1920s and the late 19th century.

In the film, disillusioned screenwriter Gill Pender (Owen Wilson) vacations in Paris with his fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her "pedantic" parents. One night, hanging out with Inez's friends, Gill gets a little drunk and wanders off one of Paris's cobbled alleys. As the clock strikes midnight, a vintage car picks him up. It transports him to the 1920s, where he meets the writers from the Lost Generation—Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and artists like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. He also meets—and falls in love with—Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a costume designer in a relationship with Picasso.

In "Midnight in Paris," Gill and Adriana travel back to the late 19th century Belle Époque, which she considers the golden age of Paris. They meet artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas, who, in turn, consider the Renaissance to be the golden age of their city. Realising that one cannot keep yearning for a nostalgic past because our presents seem to be without magic, Gill returns to his present day. He breaks up with Inez, who has been having an affair and decides to continue living in Paris.

Walking around the streets of Paris, looking into shop windows, sitting down at one of the pavement tables of the city's numerous cafés as Gill in the film has, in fact, a much longer history. A young man of means walking around the city streets at leisure, observing his fellow citizens, is a literary character called flaneur who frequently appears in 19th-century fiction. Philosopher Walter Benjamin renewed the interest in the flaneur figure when he claimed that the urban wanderer was key to our understanding of modernism. Gill is a flaneur whose wanderings not only help him work out the plot of his novel but also find love in Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), an antique dealer and fellow lover of the Lost Generation. In the film's final scene, they walk away in the Parisian rain in an almost heart-wrenchingly nostalgic image.

Solaris: Islands In Space

Russian psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent on an interstellar mission to a space station above a fictional oceanic planet in the Soviet film "Solaris" (1979), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Kelvin's mission has been prompted by astronauts, who are manning the space station, reporting strange occurrences such as the appearance of apparitions.

Soon after arriving at the station, Kelvin, too, starts seeing the apparition of his wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), who had killed herself several years ago. He learns from the scientists on the station that the planet Solaris constructed Hari from Kelvin's memories. When the planet's weather makes Kelvin unwell, he falls asleep and dreams of his mother. Upon waking up, he finds the other scientists have destroyed Hari's apparition and started projecting his brain waves on the planet's watery surface, resulting in islands forming on Solaris. Kelvin considers returning to Earth but eventually settles on an island of the planet.

Though released only on limited screens in the USSR of the 1970s, the film has gained a cult following over the past half-century. Besides an official remake in 2002, directed by Steven Soderbergh, it has also influenced other films, such as "Inception" (Christopher Nolan, 2010). Novelist Salman Rushdie called it a "sci-fi masterpiece… (an) exploration of the unreliability of reality and the power of the human unconscious… (a) great exploration of the limits of rationalism and the perverse power of even the most ill-fated love."

As Rushdie rightly points out, "Solaris" is a film about love more than it is about any ingenious sci-fi manoeuvre. But it is also a film about falling in love with ghosts.

In love, We Find Ourselves

Love is the motivation for Kelvin in his interstellar adventure, and Rick at his café in Casablanca, and Gill wandering around the streets of Paris like a flaneur. Love makes them travel through space and time, only to discover something about themselves.

In his poem "Ithaka", C P Cavafy advises a young voyager: "As you set out for Ithaka, / hope your road is a long one, / full of adventure, full of discovery."

Travelling to Ithaca is not a desire to find a new land; on the contrary, it is a yearning for home. For Odysseus in Homer's epic, Ithaca is his home, which he returns to after many years of wandering.

Rick has found a home in Casablanca, shielded, at least for the moment, from the ravages of war. Gill returns to a less-than-magical present time to realise that only this could be his home. And Kelvin refuses to return to Earth, having found a shelter, even an imaginary one, on the planet of Solaris.

"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves," writes Pico Iyer. It is in finding ourselves that our travel desires are fulfilled.

Uttaran Das Gupta is a New Delhi-based writer and journalist. He teaches journalism at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat