The sym­bol­ic pow­er of car­a­vans in female com­ing-of-age films

“A car­a­van park has the capac­i­ty to be both dream and night­mare, with only a flim­sy plas­tic wall as the line between the two.” This quote from writer/​director Claire Oak­ley, tak­en from the pro­duc­tion notes of her debut fea­ture, Make Up, sets the tone for an oneir­ic fever dream in which a teenage girl expe­ri­ences her sex­u­al awak­en­ing against the bristling back­drop of sand dunes and sta­t­ic car­a­vans on the north coast of Cornwall.

Oak­ley uses this cen­tral loca­tion to elic­it feel­ings of suf­fo­ca­tion, claus­tro­pho­bia and banal­i­ty, jux­ta­posed with the eeri­ness and wilder­ness of the sea, the wind and the nat­ur­al habi­tat sur­round­ing these stark, sta­t­ic struc­tures. Here, the car­a­van site becomes a psy­cho­log­i­cal ter­rain, forg­ing a unique evo­ca­tion of girlhood.

The Dar­d­enne broth­ers’ Palme d’Or-winning 1999 dra­ma Roset­ta is also set with­in a sta­t­ic car­a­van park, this time in the Bel­gian town of Seraing. Unlike the out-of-sea­son hol­i­day park in which Oakley’s film is set, Roset­ta fol­lows the pover­ty-strick­en lives of 17-year-old Roset­ta (played by Emile Dequenne) and her alco­holic moth­er, who per­ma­nent­ly reside in a sta­t­ic car­a­van. Their mod­est home is often filled with harsh light, and Roset­ta is tight­ly framed as if she were phys­i­cal­ly trapped, call­ing to mind the pond traps her moth­er sets up ille­gal­ly in order to catch wild trout.

Like the final gasps of the trout as they are pulled from the water, we hear Rosetta’s breaths on the sound­track as she con­stant­ly nav­i­gates her des­o­late urban sur­round­ings, cap­tur­ing the vital­i­ty of her body and her impas­sioned exis­tence, in spite of the suf­fo­cat­ing mis­for­tune she must endure. Fol­low­ing Dequenne’s mov­ing per­for­mance and the Dar­d­ennes’ sen­si­tive treat­ment of their sub­ject mat­ter, a new law was passed in Bel­gium, the ​‘Roset­ta Law’, pro­hibit­ing employ­ers from pay­ing teenagers less than the min­i­mum wage.

In Isabel Coixet’s My Life With­out Me, Sarah Pol­ley plays Ann, a clean­er in her for­mer high school with an unem­ployed hus­band and two small daugh­ters, all liv­ing with Ann’s moth­er (bril­liant­ly played by Deb­bie Har­ry) in a sta­t­ic car­a­van. When Ann is diag­nosed with a ter­mi­nal ill­ness she decides not to tell any­one, instead pick­ing up a video cam­era and film­ing her lasts as per­ma­nent means through which to remain in their lives forever.

This sub­tle, poet­ic film finds joy in small places, not least the car­a­van where the fam­i­ly are seen savour­ing pork ribs soaked in milk and eat­ing out of cere­al bowls as Ann starts to repo­si­tion her­self as detached observ­er, tak­ing on the guise of watch­ful film­mak­er lov­ing­ly embrac­ing them through her self-made film (Pol­ley also went on to achieve suc­cess as a direc­tor with Away From Her and Sto­ries We Tell).

While domes­tic­i­ty is seem­ing­ly unevent­ful and all who reside with­in the walls of Coixet’s nar­ra­tive make the most of their mod­est exis­tence, the car­a­van is an alto­geth­er dif­fer­ent space of dis­pos­ses­sion and arrest­ed devel­op­ment in Daniel Wolfe’s daz­zling British thriller from 2014, Catch Me Dad­dy. Adrift in a car­a­van on the York­shire Moors, Laila (Sameena Jabeen Ahmed) runs away with her boyfriend, flee­ing her Pak­istani fam­i­ly. On the run from what is strong­ly sug­gest­ed through­out as the threat of an hon­our killing, Laila finds momen­tary tran­scen­dence in the mist and grass below her feet and the music she plays loud­ly in the shaky car­a­van, danc­ing fever­ish­ly to Pat­ti Smith’s ​‘Wild Horses’).

While Laila is seen liv­ing with her boyfriend (Con­nor McCar­ron), it is through Laila’s appre­ci­a­tion of her strange and fer­al new world, com­bined with the gauzy, shud­der­ing tex­tures of Rob­bie Ryan’s dreamy cin­e­matog­ra­phy which make this not only an inci­sive look at female agency and the cul­tur­al sys­tems which negate it, but also pre­car­i­ous­ness of free­dom, of the mind and body, held togeth­er by the thin walls of a pitched up caravan.

Final­ly, in Marc Evans’ uncon­ven­tion­al 2010 road movie, Patag­o­nia, we fol­low a Welsh woman named Gwen (Nia Roberts) and her pho­tog­ra­ph­er boyfriend (Matthew Grav­elle) as they leave Cardiff in search of the latter’s ances­tral home in South Amer­i­ca. This sto­ry runs par­al­lel with anoth­er, old­er woman’s plight to jour­ney back to Wales from Argenti­na, hop­ing to locate her mother’s village.

The singer Duffy plays a Welsh car­a­van park employ­ee and we watch her sit­ting in the dap­pled light of the val­ley in which her car­a­van is sit­ed, rather like a lit­tle icon of what home should look like, but rarely seen from the inside, the car­a­van is a mark­er of domes­tic­i­ty which is nev­er ful­ly realised, a myth fur­ther empha­sised through the ancient imagery of the Welsh hill­sides and Patag­on­ian moun­tains, an uncan­ny sym­me­try emerg­ing between them.

Like Oakley’s reck­on­ing with the plas­tic and the per­ma­nent, the sta­t­ic and the wild, the afore­men­tioned films use the car­a­van as a metaphor for female expres­sion and self-dis­cov­ery, turn­ing the idea of the domes­tic space and the home upside down. As such, they stand among most inti­mate por­tray­als of class, sex­u­al­i­ty and girl­hood con­tem­po­rary cin­e­ma has to offer.