In an odd coincidence that shows how much this kind of story was probably burning to be told, two movies debuting at major festivals this past year have both depicted the same unlikely gay romance — one involving gritty, hardworking professional truckers living on the road.

The first was director David Pablos’ powerful and punishing Mexican thriller On the Road, which premiered in Venice and walked away with the Orizzonti prize. Violent, stylized and sexually explicit, it managed to spin a surprisingly moving love story out of plenty of bullets and bodily fluids, leaving the viewer shaken by the time the gas finally ran out.

French filmmaker Pierre Le Gall’s promising feature debut, Flesh and Fuel (Du Fioul dans les artères), which premieres in Cannes‘ Critics’ Week sidebar, plays like a tender, more hopeful Gallic cousin to that dark movie.

Not that this relationship drama isn’t without conflicts, hang-ups and kerfuffles, many of them involving the logistical difficulties of hooking up when you’re constantly on the highway and forced to meet stringent delivery deadlines throughout Europe. Yet in what could have been another existential and very French tale of impossible love, albeit one set predominantly in the cabins of 18-wheelers or anonymous roadside rest stops, Le Gall has boldly chosen to offer up the possibility of redemption.

That seems unlikely at first, given the film’s stoical protagonist and the sooty, rather soulless world he inhabits, which looks like the ideal setting for another downbeat Dardennes brothers flick. Indeed, when we first meet 40-something Étienne (Alexis Manenti), he’s so devoted to his longtime job as a pro trucker — a job, we learn, that his father also did before him — that he has little time for anything beyond hitting the road over and over again.

As the top driver at his regional French shipping company, Étienne always delivers on schedule and serves as a role model for new recruits, including the unruly if endearing Jordan (Armindo Alves de Sa), who’s only starting to learn the ropes. Whenever he’s not behind the wheel, Étienne stays in close contact with his sister (Julie Duclos) and her kid, whom he showers with gifts and Facetime calls from wherever he happens to be parked.

There’s just one twist to his monastic life on the highway, and we learn about it early on when Étienne drifts away from a rest stop into a nearby forest filled with fellow gay truckers looking to cruise. Le Gall and DP Antoine Cormier (The Kingdom) capture that sequence in an almost mystical manner, lending elegance to all the random couplings. They do the same for other scenes that manage to find beauty in faceless locations, bringing a welcome shade of warmth to places most of us would drive through and quickly forget.

Étienne, however, never forgets his first tussle in the woods with Bartosz (Julian Swiezewski), a Polish driver who thankfully saves his lover’s skin when the cops show up to arrest them and other men for indecent behavior. The two wind up crossing paths again and hooking up much more intensely, in a sweaty and passionate bout of lovemaking that sets the stage for a true romance.

You can see why the two are attracted to each other, and it’s not only because they both spend their days and nights driving turnpikes for long stretches. As much as Étienne is quiet and contained, Bartosz is fun and infectious — an upbeat party boy who happens to operate a 16-ton truck. He seems to have found something in their grueling existences that Étienne has never contemplated: the potential for joy in a rough and thankless world.

But as the necessities of their jobs begin to push them farther apart, truckdriving becomes a serious obstacle to their budding relationship. In Étienne’s case, this is because his struggling company lands a new contract with the U.K., requiring him to wait for hours, sometimes days, to cross over the border. For Bartosz, who works for a Polish firm undercutting their European competition with low prices, it means driving to hell and back for a pittance of what Étienne makes, and with hardly any time off.

It’s nearly impossible for love to thrive under such conditions, although in two memorable sequences Le Gall shows how it can still rear its head in unlikely places. The first is when Étienne and Bartosz, who keep in touch via phone and CB radio, find a way to pass one another on a bridge as they head opposite ways, honking triumphantly and locking eyes for a split-second. In the other, Étienne spots Bartosz’s rig at the massive Rungis wholesale food market outside Paris, chasing him down on foot and nearly getting run over so he can force him to hit the brakes.  

In his most disarming role yet, the always engaging Manenti, who broke through in 2019 as the crooked cop in Ladj Ly’s banlieue crime thriller Les Misérables, plays a kindhearted if gloomy man who decided to accept his solitary existence on the road long ago, then finds that his only chance at escaping that life may be crushingly taken away from him. Polish actor Swiezewski proves a worthy antidote to Manenti’s stolidness, bringing charm and exuberance to their scenes together.

In dramas such as this — both David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Ang Lee’s clearly influential Brokeback Mountain come to mind — the would-be couples typically don’t stay together and usually one of them, or else love itself, winds up dying. Without giving away how Flesh and Fuel ends, it’s worth commending Le Gall for choosing a different route. The fact that he sees some hope in Étienne’s and Bartosz’s future is not only a sign of his romanticism. It’s a testament to his belief that those who toil away at unforgiving jobs deserve their fair share of happiness, if they can just find the right exit ramp.