The title of French director Manuel Poirier's award-winning 1997 film Western is one big red herring. Instead of tumbleweeds, shoot-outs, and cowboys, the movie's widescreen vistas focus on the conventional conversations and minor personal quests of everyday people. When a chance encounter with a would-be car thief (Sacha Bourdo) leads to an unlikely friendship, and an unlikely romance leads him to rethink his options as a shoe salesman, handsome Spaniard Sergi López and wiry new Russian buddy Bourdo set out hitchhiking throughout the Brittany region of France. Western is a relationship movie, but often in the literal, relativist sense: The film toys with the idea that your identity is determined not by where you're from but where you find love. It's an intriguing theory that makes the otherwise simple movie seem more complex and frequently affecting. Bourdo and López make a great odd-couple team of incomplete wandering souls, each looking for complementary lovers and the stability they offer. Poirier makes his fascination with notions of nationality blatant: It's no coincidence that Bourdo and López's characters are not of French descent, and that another major character they encounter is African. Poirier himself is Franco-Peruvian, and he makes a point of noting the disparate backgrounds of those listed in the film's end credits. As one of the brightest stars of the new wave of humanistic French filmmakers, Poirier is most interested in the lives of those living in the rural regions of France and the divisions promoted by differences, be they in class, race, philosophy, or beauty. In the small towns of Brittany, feelings of xenophobia are not camouflaged by the enforced cosmopolitanism that marks big cities: The lonely outsiders of Western must actively seek out the company of others to overcome their insecurities.