In Road, Movie director Dev Benegal combines two of cinema’s greatest ongoing devices: tales from the open road and an unabashed love of movies for their own sake. Yes, Hollywood loves seeing quirky characters take to the long and winding road where they find commonality and adventure, and if you can squeeze in the notion of love for movies as force to bring people together, that only sweetens the deal. Except Road, Movie isn’t a Hollywood movie, it’s from India and about as far from Bollywood as you can get. Occasionally serious, sometimes surprising, often off-kilter, Road, Movie plays with popular notions of Indian cinema. In other words, the only people singing and dancing are those in the old Bollywood films are screened within the movies.
Vishnu (Abhay Deol) is a young man without direction, but fortunately his father has a pre-existing business just demanding of Vishnu’s assistance. Unfortunately, that business is that sale of hair oil that promises the holy trifecta of relaxation, virility and a head full of long, luxurious hippie hair. Yearning for escape from his perceived fate, Vichnu hits the open road in a barely-functional truck that doubles a cinema on wheels. To call it a heap would be an understatement, but Vichnu sees nothing but a way to get away from a life he’s desperate to leave behind. On the open road, he picks up a young runaway (Mohammed Usmani), a talkative old man (Satish Kaushik) and a beautiful woman (Tannishtha Chatterjee) and together they find more fun and trouble then they bargained for on the back roads of Rajasthan.
The film was occasionally fun, but I found the supporting characters rather typical archetypes that really didn’t seem to break out of their constructed shell. Vishnu meanwhile was a thoroughly unlikable character that seemed to have nothing much in the way of redeemable qualities, and why the others stuck with him through think and thin was a question I failed to be able to answer for the life of me. The story itself tends to stick a little too much to those normal road movie clichés where vast understandings are gulfed and adventure is found around every corner simply because they’re “on the road.” Amusement parks pop out of nowhere, banditos (or their Indian equivalent) can be conned into letting you go, and despite the fact you live in country of over a billion people, true love is the first woman you see on your trip. The actors were good, the scenery beautifully photographed, but I never really felt fully engaged by the movie.
