Abstract
Cédric Kahn is one of the most interesting directors to have emerged in France in recent years. A striking feature of a number of his films is the central place of the car and the act of driving. In L’Ennui (1998), Roberto Succo (2001) and most strikingly Feux rouges (2004) the car acts as both a motivating narrative device and a central metaphor for the protagonists’ mental state. In this essay I look at the depiction of the road trip in Feux rouges and attempt to unpack the ways in which the trip is used to trigger and represent the central protagonist’s masculine identity crisis asking what this can suggest to us about contemporary discourses of masculinity and society more broadly.