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“The film never quite manages to give us a coherent vision of this journey or,

rather, makes the point that there is no such thing as a unified perspective.”

(Rosello, “Ismael Ferroukhi Balelized road movie”, 24)

Comment and explain this comment by Rosello.

Word count: 2185

Le Grand Voyage shows the journey of a father and son at odds; they are of a different

generation, nationality, religion, and they each speak a different language. Rosello

opines that the film ‘makes the point that there is no such thing as a unified

perspective,’ he sees that Reda and his father symbolically make two different journeys

and never the twain shall meet.1 Yes, their relationship is defined by juxtaposition, and

the film takes great pains to highlight how hard they find it to relate to or understand

each other, but as their journey continues, they draw closer to reaching a state of

understanding. Thusly, this essay will argue that the film itself is a meditation on

empathy and compassion. Despite the push and pull between father and son, despite

their different perspectives, director Ismaël Ferroukhi shows that a variety of

perspectives needn’t stand in the way of human connection, but can instead reinforce

the ability to relate to one other.

In Le Grand Voyage, exposition is hard-won. Whatever the viewer learns about Reda and

his father has to be sought out, there are gaps to be filled in: Reda has a white, French

girlfriend, and no interest in pilgrimage, showing that he doesn’t keep the same values

and concerns as his father, who is deeply religious and has prioritised the hajj above his

son’s education. We meet the two men as we would meet a stranger, just like the cast of

strangers that they will help and be helped by. This forces an openness to and interest in

the pair, aligning with the film’s concerns with empathy and connection. Interestingly,

there is no clear power dynamic between father and son - they both have different

1
Mireille Rosello, ‘Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie’, Thamyris/Intersecting:
Place, Sex & Race, vol. 23 (2011), p.24

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strengths and weaknesses. Reda can drive, so he is notionally leading the journey, but

the father is the one who chooses which way they will drive. The father’s control in this

area is signalled in the very beginnings of their journey, where Reda refuses his father’s

directions, to which the old man responds by pulling the handbrake on the highway,

risking both their lives. Because of this balance, Ferroukhi denies any sense of a

protagonist/antagonist or right/wrong dichotomy. Valerie Orlando sees that the film

‘[dispells] the notion that we are incapable of living with one another in peace’ the

respective dispositions of Reda and his father are given equal space and time in the film,

even when they don’t it for each other. 2

One of the most immediate differences between Reda and his father is the languages

they speak, respectively French and (Moroccan) Arabic. Straight away their nationalities

are revealed, Reda is shown to be a product of his upbringing in France: he understands

his father’s Arabic but he doesn’t speak it. And the father is the opposite, he

understands his son speaking French but, at least initially, he appears to be unable to

speak French. Almost halfway through the film, when the father speaks with the Turkish

authorities, it is revealed that he speaks perfect French, that therefore it is a conscious

choice to speak to his son in his own mother tongue. This could be viewed as a

distancing tactic, perhaps a way of shaming his son for not speaking Arabic, enforcing a

distinction between them; Reda certainly seems to receive it this way. Yet this is not so,

Ferroukhi asserts that ‘he speaks in Arabic in hopes of passing the language on to his

son’, that the father’s speaking in Arabic is in fact an attempt at making a connection,

not denying it.3 With this knowledge, it instead appears that the father is attempting to

reconnect Reda with his roots, his history, his identity through the language he grew up

speaking. But being from a different generation, he doesn’t have the language to

express this, and is instead resigned to being taciturn and curmudgeonly.

2
Valerie Orlando, Screening Morocco: Contemporary Depictions in Film of a Changing
Society, (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2011), p.50
3
Michael Toler, ‘Interview with the Filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi’, in World Literature
Today, 81 (2007), p.34

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Reda’s father comes into his own when they reach the Arab countries and he can

converse freely in his own language. When they reach Saudi Arabia, Reda’s father

befriends a group of fellow pilgrims from across Africa and the Middle East, and they

talk, eat, and pray together. All of this is facilitated by the fact they share a language;

they converse in traditional Arabic, which, as his father explains to the group, Reda

doesn’t understand, as he can only understand the Moroccan Arabic that his parents

speak. This interaction serves, in part, to underline why it is that Reda’s father would

want him to learn Arabic: to give him the opportunity to forge these same connections

and to expose him to what else might be shared other than just the language itself. Yet,

as Rosello notes, Reda ‘does not consider the possibility that his father knows other

things, knows differently,’ he sees his ability to drive, to speak English, his youth, as

making him naturally more capable and worldly. 4 Yet his father has his own kind of

language that Reda does not speak, he chooses the route they follow to Mecca, he

makes a wordless exchange of currencies with a man outside the bureau de change in

Turkey, he knows where and how to hide the money that they survive on. Ironically for

Reda, his speaking English doesn’t get him anywhere, ‘do you speak English?’ is never

graced with a response. For Reda’s father, the more successful lingua franca isn’t a

language but an instinct or a feeling, a disposition towards kinship and empathy.

Reda understands but does not speak Arabic, his father is fluent in French but refuses to

speak it. Rosello notes that in Le Grand Voyage, ‘the practice of Islam itself is concretely

represented as a multifaceted reality’, and like language, religion defies singular

definition and is represented as the multifarious entity that it is.5 For Ferroukhi, there is

no one way to be Muslim. Reda’s brother, who was originally meant to undertake the

hajj with their father, gives his younger brother his camera, and asks him to ‘bring back

a few photos’ for him. So this pilgrimage is important to him, yet he cannot go because

4
Rosello, ‘Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie’, p.14
5
Rosello, ‘Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie’, p.9

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he is arrested for drink-driving, despite alcohol being traditionally forbidden in Islam.

The father is a more traditional Muslim, and Ferroukhi feels that ‘[his] interest in Islam is

in its application […] the Islam of the majority,’ it is the moral and principals of religion

that are most important to him.6 David Laderman contends that ‘the European road

movie foregrounds the meaning of the quest journey more than the mode of transport’,

and in Le Grand Voyage, Reda’s father waxes lyrical to his son on what the hajj means

to him, why he must drive there rather than simply flying.7 He tells his Reda ‘when the

waters of the ocean rise to the heavens, they lose their bitterness to become pure

again’, and for a moment he reveals a little of his inner life, what makes him function the

way he does – his love and devotion to religion.

Zakat, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, is the obligation of almsgiving, and Reda’s father

practises this by giving money to a woman begging with her young son. Reda snatches

the money out of his hands, shocked that his father would give any of what little funds

they have left to a stranger. He is resistant to Islam, and ignorant of one its most

important teachings. Earlier in the film, at the Italian border control, he is embarrassed

that his father has to pray at the side of the road, he doesn’t understand what compels

his father to do this. This distinction between the two men is displayed visually and

metaphorically in a scene when they have reached Saudi Arabia. First Reda’s father and

the pilgrims he has befriended, all dressed in traditional garb, are shown praying on

desert sand, a reflection of their unity in religion, the community they have forged. Then

the camera cuts to Reda in a t-shirt and jeans, writing “Lisa” on a sand dune with his

trainer, reflecting his alignment with secular France over his Muslim heritage. It is again

important to note that these are not the merely two ways that Islam is represented but,

as always in Le Grand Voyage, there is another way. At the Turkish border control, they

meet Mustapha, a fellow Muslim who uses his knowledge of both French and Turkish to

6
From ‘Interview with the Filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi’, p.36
7
David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie (Austin: University of
Texas, 2002), p.248; quoted in Thibaut Schilt ‘Itinerant Men, Evanescent Women:
Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Le Grand Voyage’, in The French Review, 83 (2010), 786-797 (p.789)

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help the pair to cross the border. Ali Jafaar posits that in this meeting, the film ‘expands

into a three-handed reflection on Islam and its application in the 21st century.’8

Mustapha joins their pilgrimage and on the way takes Reda drinking, talks to him,

relates to him, and in doing so shows another way of being Muslim in today’s society.

Yet the father is suspicious, not just because of Mustapha’s less traditional relationship

to Islam, but because he has disrupted the nascent father/son bond that was just

beginning to form. Mustapha’s arrival comes just after an episode where Reda has to

take his father to the hospital, which leads to a renewal of the opportunity for intimacy

between the two men. This is frustrated by the obvious connection between Mustapha

and Reda, who sees the newcomer as having what his father lacks; a more

contemporary way of practising Islam. Ferroukhi notes that ‘the Islam of Mustapha is

that of an elite,’ it is a more interpretative, cerebral take on religion than that of Reda’s

father.9 And so a bond is formed between Mustapha and Reda. They drink, they talk,

they speak in French. It seems like Reda has more in common with Mustapha than his

own father, who makes no effort to understand his son. Near the beginning of their

journey, in Italy, the father takes Reda’s mobile phone whilst he is sleeping and throws it

in the bin, cutting off all contact with home life and thus confining his son to his mode of

living, to his journey. Similarly, Reda has no interest in his father’s way of life or what

compels him to live this way. At the start, they are undertaking the same physical

voyage, but experiencing completely different journeys.

Rosello seems to suggest that their entire journey continues in this vein, that they are

constantly at odds and they find no resolution or common ground. But as time goes by,

they begin to relate to each other. Reda, reaches out, he asks his father why pilgrimage

is important to him. He offers Reda an explanation, and even tells a story of his own

father’s hajj, how he would sit up on a hill and wait for him every night before he

8
Ali Jafaar, ‘Le Grand Voyage’, in Sight & Sound, 15.11, 2005, 66-67 (p.67)

9
From ‘Interview with the Filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi’, p.36

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returned, now a hajji. It isn’t linear, but the two men make attempts to see things from

each other’s point of view, to understand their different experiences. After his father dies

at Mecca, Reda performs Islamic funereal rites and washes his body in preparation for

burial, a symbolic act of respect not just to his father, but to Islam itself, to his father’s

religious practice. The last thing he does before getting in the taxi to begin his journey

home is give money to a homeless woman, mirroring his own father’s almsgiving earlier

in the film, in contrast to his previous rejection of this act. So the moral code that Reda’s

father lived by has got through to him, signalling the beginning of a different way of life

that he now may lead, because of his father.

To conclude, meanings are never freely handed to the viewer, Ferroukhi leaves it to us

to make our own interpretations and conclusions. Yet there is one message that runs

through the whole of Le Grand Voyage, which makes the case for empathy and the

beauty in learning through experiencing. Perhaps, as Rosello says, ‘there is no such

thing as a unified perspective’, but that is not the point. 10 Ferroukhi notes that ‘we are

watching a real rediscovery of a part of [Reda] that he has lost touch with’, and the film

highlights that many different perspectives can and do coexist in harmony.11 Reda learns

to respect his heritage and to appreciate people of all their many backgrounds. He learns

that there is more than one way of existing in the world, of moving through life.

10
Rosello, ‘Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie’, p.24
11
From ‘Interview with the Filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi’, p.35

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Bibliography:
- Cadé, Michel, ‘Hidden Islam: The Role of the Religious in Beur and Banlieue

Cinema’, in Screening Integration: Recasting Magrhebi Immigration in

Contemporary France, ed. by Sylvie Durmelat and Vinay Swamy, (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 2011)

- Ferroukhi, Ismaël (dir.), Le grand voyage (Pyramide Distribution, 2004)

- Jafaar, Ali, ‘Le Grand Voyage’, Sight & Sound, 15.11 (2005), 66-67

- Orlando, Valerie, Screening Morocco: Contemporary Depictions in Film of a

Changing Society, (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011)

- Rosello, Mireille, ‘Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Babelized Road Movie’,

Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex & Race, 24 (2011), 257-275

- Schilt, Thibaut, ‘Itinerant Men, Evanescent Women: Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Le Grand

Voyage’, The French Review, 83 (2010), 786-797

- Toler, Michael, ‘Interview with the Filmmaker Ismaël Ferroukhi’, in World

Literature Today, 81, 2007, 34-37.