Travelling Without Leaving Yourself: Exoticism in the Mirror of Prejudice

The Tourists places its holidaymakers in a country that is almost entirely absent from the stage and exists only through the images they project onto it. The villa thus becomes less a place of discovery than a closed setting in which two socially opposed couples confront their different ways of believing themselves superior. Their shared surname turns them into doubles of the same French society: behind the socially conscious tourism of one pair and the budget holidays of the other lie the same consumerism, the same certainties, and a similar ignorance of elsewhere.

The circulation of names, clothes and luggage extends this play of mirrors until the comedy of character shifts into political satire. The drachmas—first a criminal fortune, then worthless paper, and finally a sought-after currency—reveal that value depends less on things themselves than on the narratives and powers that legitimise them. Maurice’s true identity adds a more intimate dimension to this critique: by adopting the viewpoint of one’s social environment, one can end up becoming a stranger to one’s own origins. Travel, then, does not necessarily free us from prejudice; sometimes it merely provides an exotic setting in which to replay it.