Flesh and Fuel: A Queer Love Story on the Motorway

Two truck drivers, a motorway service area and a love story that refuses to stay in the fast lane. Flesh and Fuel (Du fioul dans les artères), the first feature by French filmmaker Pierre Le Gall, arrives in Belgian cinemas on 2 December. Premiered at Critics’ Week in Cannes, the film pairs Alexis Manenti and Polish actor Julian Świeżewski in a tender, road-worn romance about desire, loneliness and trying to make time for love when work has taken over everything else.

Love, parked between two journeys

Étienne is a truck driver with little room left for anything beyond the road. He is devoted to his work, permanently in transit and worn down by the routines of long-haul transport. His intimate life has been reduced to fleeting nighttime encounters with strangers around motorway service stations.

Then he meets Bartosz, a Polish truck driver. The encounter is immediate, physical and full of possibility. But the real story begins afterwards: when a one-night meeting becomes the wish to see someone again — even when their schedules, routes and working conditions are built to keep them apart.

The film is not interested in turning its characters’ sexuality into a tragic revelation or a coming-out drama. Étienne and Bartosz know who they are. The obstacle is much more ordinary, and perhaps more crushing: impossible hours, kilometres, exhaustion, low pay and the deep isolation of a job that keeps workers moving while the rest of life happens somewhere else.

As Pierre Le Gall has explained, the question was never why two openly gay, single men could not love one another. The question was how they could make a relationship survive under conditions that leave so little space for tenderness.

Two men, one missing image

There is something quietly radical in the film’s starting point. Queer cinema has given us plenty of secret encounters, forbidden romances and nightlife love stories. Two truck drivers falling in love may sound simple, but it is still an image rarely granted the space, dignity and romance it deserves on screen.

At Cannes, critics repeatedly returned to that absence. “Two truck drivers embracing is an image cinema was missing,” wrote Surimpressions. Flesh and Fuel places queerness not in a glossy metropolitan bubble, but amid concrete, industrial zones, trucks, fuel pumps and anonymous roadside rest areas.

This is not an attempt to make working-class life picturesque. The film looks at a profession that is often invisible until something arrives at our door: the long days, bad food, disrupted sleep and social isolation of the people moving goods across Europe.

By placing a queer romance there, Le Gall gently dismantles the myth of the rugged, emotionally unavailable trucker. The characters are not symbols of masculinity to be fixed or mocked. They are simply men with bodies, needs, awkwardness, humour and a right to want more than survival.

Alexis Manenti in a different gear

Alexis Manenti, best known to many viewers for intense roles including Les Misérables, takes on Étienne with a striking combination of reserve and vulnerability. Critics in Cannes highlighted the role as one of his finest, praising the warmth he brings to a character whose quietness could easily have become opacity.premiere+1

Opposite him, Julian Świeżewski plays Bartosz, the more talkative and gangly Polish driver whose working life has its own economic pressures. Bartosz’s situation also points towards the unequal realities within Europe’s transport industry: crossing borders may sound like freedom, but for many workers it means relentless travel for very little reward.

The two actors make the romance believable because the film does not rush to turn their connection into a grand declaration. It begins in glances, pauses and the difficult logistics of trying to make an impossible arrangement work. There is tenderness here, but no romantic fantasy about precarity.

Grey concrete, soft light

Visually, Flesh and Fuel finds beauty in landscapes rarely associated with romance: service stations, roadsides, zonings, lorry parks and industrial sprawl. Its naturalistic approach is softened by humour and by a real sensitivity to the strange poetry of life on the move.

Cinematographer Antoine Cormier has been praised for his treatment of this world of concrete and grey skies, while Paul Sabin’s score accompanies the story’s emotional undercurrent.

The title itself suggests a collision of harsh material reality and something more intimate. Fuel keeps the trucks running. But the characters are looking for another form of energy: the chance to feel close to someone, to be wanted beyond a passing encounter, and to imagine a future that is not dictated entirely by a delivery schedule.

A queer story without apology

For queer audiences, Flesh and Fuel offers something precious: a romance where being gay is not the issue to be solved. The tenderness between Étienne and Bartosz is neither sensationalised nor made exceptional. It is given the same cinematic attention often reserved for straight love stories — longing, bad timing, hope, fear and the decision to try anyway.

That does not make the film apolitical. On the contrary, its politics sit in what it chooses to show: queer men outside the usual urban stereotypes; migrant labour and unequal economic conditions; working-class bodies allowed to be vulnerable; motorway service areas transformed into sites of connection.

Premiering in Critics’ Week at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, the film was also nominated for the Caméra d’Or and received the Queer Palm Revelation Prize.

Practical information

What? Flesh and Fuel (Du fioul dans les artères), a romantic drama by Pierre Le Gall
Belgian release: Wednesday 2 December 2026
Director: Pierre Le Gall
Cast: Alexis Manenti as Étienne; Julian Świeżewski as Bartosz; with Armindo Alves de Sa, Mohamed Makhtoumi and others
Running time: 90 minutes
Festival journey: Presented at the 79th Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week; nominated for the Caméra d’Or and awarded the Queer Palm Revelation Prize.
Watch the trailer: YouTubesurimpressions

A romance of truck stops, missed exits and brave detours, Flesh and Fuel gives two men on the road something cinema too often withholds from them: time to be tender.