The deliberate comma in the title of the cinema “Road, Movie” is telling, for the movie has two overbearing purposes – to showcase the amazing allure of the open Road and to impress upon the audience the sheer magic of moving-frames.
In his latest movie after a decade, Dev Benegal tries his best to put together a tale which is an ode to his love for cinema and the frantic tug of the road less traveled. To me, it appears that the director desired a mighty clubbing of the spirit of the
Road-movie genre (where a protagonist comes of age at the end of his travel), with a
Cinema-paradiso or a
The Dreamers, but fails, although one can’t but praise the outrageous attempt. Nevertheless, it’s a welcome brave hindi-language cinema, with mainstream actors, against the odds of box-office pressures.
Although the movie appears well conceptualized, it tends to lose pace as the story progresses, since in some parts it appears a bit underwritten and therefore unfortunately borders on the could-be.
Briefly, the story is about the young Vishnu (Abhay Deol), who’s stuck and suffocating in the oil-business selling 'Aatma Tel' with his father. He grabs an opportunity where he has to transport a sickly, rickety Chevrolet truck, laden with cinema-reels and equipment and cartons of oil across the vast desert to a museum, and the prodigal Road starts rolling from then on! What follows, are Michel Amathieu's drop-dead gorgeous desert-scapes of the Kutch which are outrageously beautiful in their stoic-severity. The journey carries on with no civilization in sight, neighbored only by an unforgivingly arid and dry desert. Thankfully, the movie is low on traditional cosmetic embellishments, the ubiquitous song and dance sequences or those incredible costume-changes, although there’s an inane shove-smooch sequence thrown in.
While driving his rickety destiny-on-wheels across the sands, Vishnu picks up a dhaba-boy (Mohammed Faisal), who’s in the lookout for a better life, a rotund, ageing and garrulous cinema-lover mechanic (Satish Kaushik) who insists being dropped to the ‘mela’, and a sultry-siren gypsy girl (Tannishtha Chatterjee) in search of water. There’s an encounter with a corrupt cop (Veerendra Saxena) who’s willing to let them go only if they show him a movie, and in the moments that follow, the uncanny, sweeping love and power of moving-reels grab you! Fantastic shots follow with projections of yesteryear movies (Deewar) on ramshackle bicycle-lined village-walls, with the amused wide-eyed band of villagers in close attention! The ever-exaggerating Keshto Mukherjee enlivens the screen with a comical-remix of his oil-massage ‘sar-jo-tera-chakraaye’ song, and the antics of the inimitable
Buster Keaton (and not
Chaplin!) has the motley mela-crowd in splits. Such is the transformative power of cinema! Few cinema-moments later, a hilarious sequence follows where the director attempts a spoof, rather successfully so, in which the cornered and beaten Vishnu barters all his stinky-oil with water with a local water-ganglord (Yashpal)!
Although the movie is low on a story, the canvas is colorful, almost bordering on the cheerful and the story-telling is lush and vivid. What saves the movie from mediocrity is perhaps the deliberate open-ended nature of the ending. Abhay Deol is convincing in the role of a suffocated, dying-to-be-free youth on the less-traveled-road but he could do a lot without his irritating fancy for levis'-poses, and Mohammed Faisal’s acting is unhinged and amusing. Satish Kaushik plays the role of the mela-hunting, cinema-loving, happy- mechanic to perfection, although Tannishtha Chatterjee got too wrapped in the glamorous-gypsy image and glaringly lacked the touch of ordinary.
A good weekend watch, all for the love of the Road and the Religion called Cinema.
Further info:
http://www.roadmoviethefilm.com/
