Desire Found Between Exhaust and Isolation

Read Time:6 Minute, 35 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Flesh and Fuel (Du fioul dans les artères) (Made of Flesh and Fuel)
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Genre: Drama, Romance
Year Released: 2026
Runtime: 1h 31m
Director(s): Pierre Le Gall
Writer(s): Pierre Le Gall
Cast: Alexis Manenti, Julian Świeżewski, Armindo Alves de Sa
Where to Watch: shown at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: FLESH & FUEL understands something that many working-class dramas spend an entire runtime trying to show. It examines how and why labor shapes people's experience of time. Writer/director Pierre Le Gall’s first feature isn’t simply about truck drivers, loneliness, or even romance. It’s about what happens to life when work consumes nearly every available hour, every physical movement, and eventually even the way someone understands themselves. The film treats exhaustion almost like an atmosphere hanging over its characters, not in a melodramatic sense, but as a permanent condition of modern survival.

Étienne lives inside repetition. Roads blur together, loading docks become interchangeable, and human connection has been reduced to anonymous encounters in truck stop parking lots that disappear before they can become emotionally perilous. Alexis Manenti plays him with an almost stubborn heaviness, like someone who has spent years compressing his world into something manageable enough to survive on the road. What makes the performance work so well is that Manenti never turns Étienne into an emblem of suffering. He’s capable, disciplined, proud of his work, and isolated all at once.

That pride matters to the film. One of the most interesting aspects of FLESH & FUEL is the respect it shows for trucking as labor. Pierre Le Gall clearly spent a great deal of time understanding the profession beyond surface-level realism. The details become incredibly specific. From unloading procedures and sleeping compartments to radio communication, the physical rituals of checking equipment, the sound of machinery, and even the strange relationship truckers develop with time itself. The film consistently reminds the audience that nearly everything surrounding life has, at some point, passed through the hands of people like Étienne.

Bartosz enters the story almost like an interruption to routine itself. Julian Świeżewski gives the character an unpredictability that changes the film's focus. Étienne is rigid, contained, compressed emotionally. Bartosz feels looser, playful, more instinctive. Le Gall keeps portions of his life at a distance, allowing the audience to experience him through Étienne’s perspective rather than fully deciphering him psychologically. That choice strengthens the dynamic because Bartosz begins to feel less like a conventional romantic lead and more like someone Étienne can never hold on to.

The chemistry between the two actors feels unusually physical without becoming performative. Le Gall talked about wanting the romance to function through bodies and instinct before dialogue, and that philosophy defines nearly every intimate scene in the film. The attraction emerges through movement, proximity, laughter, touch, and shared space rather than declarations. When the film slows down long enough to let them simply exist together, it becomes genuinely affecting.

What surprised me most was how funny the film became at times. There’s humor woven throughout the intimacy, keeping the romance from collapsing into self-seriousness. The sex scenes especially carry an awkward tenderness that feels refreshingly human. Le Gall avoids the hyper-controlled, overly polished sexuality that often dominates queer arthouse cinema. Instead, these scenes feel awkward in a way, warm, impulsive, and alive. That gives the relationship something special because the film allows its characters to laugh, tease, and breathe around one another rather than treating intimacy as a sacred performance.

FLESH & FUEL creates a fascinating contradiction. The film takes place in industrial spaces, highways, ports, loading zones, truck stops, and warehouses, yet Antoine Cormier’s cinematography finds unexpected texture and beauty within those environments. Nighttime lighting becomes especially important. Headlights, signage, fluorescent rest stops, reflective metal surfaces, and the deep darkness surrounding the roads create an atmosphere that feels both cold and strangely intimate. Even the trucks themselves begin taking on personality. Bartosz’s red truck carries a different energy than Étienne’s more restrained blue vehicle, subtly reinforcing their emotional contrast without needing dialogue to explain it.

The film’s strongest theme revolves around emotional availability under capitalism without ever turning didactic about it. Le Gall repeatedly returns to the idea that work leaves people with almost no space actually to live. Love itself becomes difficult because time has been fragmented into deliveries, deadlines, schedules, exhaustion, and survival. The relationship between Étienne and Bartosz matters partly because it temporarily interrupts that machinery. When they’re together, time slows down. The film itself even changes rhythm during those moments, becoming softer and more patient.

Alexis Manenti carries much of that shift through subtle changes. Early in the film, Étienne often looks sealed off from the world around him. As Bartosz enters his life, that rigidity slowly begins to crack. It emerges in small things, how he moves, how he looks at people, how long he allows himself to linger in moments rather than rushing to the next obligation.

At the same time, the film risks becoming too repetitive within its own structure. The emphasis on cycles and repetition is clearly intentional, but there are stretches in the middle where the narrative momentum softens slightly. Some viewers may also want deeper insight into Bartosz’s inner life beyond the mystery surrounding him. The film deliberately withholds parts of him to mirror Étienne’s experience, but that distance occasionally leaves the emotional dynamic feeling slightly uneven.

Those issues never overpower what the film accomplishes. FLESH & FUEL succeeds because it treats working-class queer intimacy with unusual sincerity and dignity. Le Gall doesn’t frame these men as tragic figures punished for desire, nor does he turn them into sanitized symbols of liberation. They’re tired workers trying to carve out moments of connection inside systems designed to leave very little room for tenderness.

There’s also something compassionate in the way the film approaches masculinity. These men work physically demanding jobs inside environments traditionally associated with emotional suppression, yet the film allows vulnerability to emerge naturally through intimacy and companionship. It never feels like the characters are abandoning masculinity so much as redefining what emotional openness inside it can look like.

FLESH & FUEL becomes less about whether this relationship can survive and more about the value of connection itself in lives structured around constant movement and isolation. Pierre Le Gall crafts a romance grounded in labor, routine, and exhaustion while still allowing space for joy, sensuality, and emotional release.

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[photo courtesy of PYRAMIDE, EX NIHILO, LUMISENTA FILM FOUNDATION, THE PR FACTORY]

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