Visually spectacular, narratively understated, cruelly real and exasperatingly slow, Road, Movie is strictly for patient souls that don’t abhor open-ended tales with sparse drama and character-driven plot.
Don’t expect a Bollywood kinda road movie where there’s a turn and twist after every mile, with a raunchy item thrown in between. Rather brace up for a languid journey on a decrepit truck through a barren landscape with a motley crew of characters that aren’t deliberately developed and defined for need of letting the viewers fill the blank with their imagination. Call it participative cinema or plain boring arthouse film, there’s no denying that Dev Benegal’s ‘Road, Movie’ is decidedly different.
For fear of getting tethered to his dad’s hair-oil business, Vishnu (Abhay Deol) chooses to hit the road by voluntarily offering to drive an antique Chevy truck to a Museum in a distant town in Rajasthan. The truck, it turns out, is a travelling cinema with an old projector and many film rolls.
On the road, Vishnu hesitatingly agrees to give lift to a young boy (Mohammed Faizal Usmani) trying to find a better life than serving chai. When the truck break down, enters the third character of a mechanic (Satish Kaushik) who fixes the truck on the condition that he gets a ride to a carnival. The trio hit the road and they come across a gypsy woman (Tanishtha Chatterjee) who offers them water.
As the quartet wheel their way through a hot and hostile desert they encounter no less hostile cops and ganglords who hoard water. But they wriggle out of every trouble by cranking to life the film projector at the back of the truck and regaling everyone from villagers to cops and goons.
The most outstanding in ‘Road, Movie’ is the cinematography by the Frenchman Michel Amathieu. Dev Benegal’s direction leaves a lot to be desired, however. After a breezy start, the movie begins to plod with hardly any substantial development in the plot. Even at a length of just over one-and-a-half hours, the movie ends up testing your patience with its barren narrative.
Performances by Satish Kaushik as the garrulous, pragmatic and hardy mechanic and by Mohammed Faizal Usmani keep the interest alive. Even Abhay Deol is reduced to a sullen, morose protagonist out to discover life and love in a lifeless, parched landscape. And there’s hardly anything to write about his chemistry with Tanishtha.
Michael Brook’s trippy score and a few genuinely funny sequences add up to the few strong points of this over-extended and somewhat pretentious saga that has too many open ends to make for a definitive story.
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