Road, Movie

The first thing that you would probably feel at the end of the movie is - The movie was Strange. The movie basically doesn't have a "real" story as in nothing really happens. I would liken this movie to something very loosely on Easy Rider. The protagonists in that movie were on a trip to Mardi Gras, here the Mechanic is searching for a Mela. They encounter few people on the way, they reach the destination and the movie ends - to put it in a oversimplified terms.

This movie does contains few moments of subtle laughter - but doesn't give you enough. The scene with the local water don is quirky and it seems that the movie is going to change some pace - but it is left at that.

Abhay Deol seems to have carried his Dev D attitude in this movie which sometimes feels like a misfit. Satish Kaushik's character as the Mechanic is the best cast.

May be few years down the line this will be termed as a defining piece of work in Indian Cinema - Bollywood does needs to change its face to catchup with the global scene and not be a laughing stock with its song and dance sequences in huge bungalows. This just might be a baby step towards that direction.

The pace of the movie acts against it. So does the technicalities. While the sunny sides are too many, Road, Movie proves to be a simple movie talking simple story.

Abhay Deol is very good, so is the supporting cast. The deserts & roads & travelogue has been wonderfully shot & photographed. There's nothing much in the dialogs or the score, but the music is kinda cool. Now the makers seem no masochists by implying what they consider the main point of the movie. It talks about life & how every person has to choose the way he lives life. And traveling begets thought.

A very slow, calm movie worth giving a look. The end title sequence will blow your mind.

BOTTOM LINE: Certainly, it is not my cup of tea when it comes to tiresome plots revolving around character's inner blankness. 5.5 out of 10.

Can be watched with a typical Indian family? YES

Mouth-Kiss/Foreplay: Mediocre | Sex/Porn/Smoking/Alcohol: No | Violence: Strong | Gore: Mild | Drugs: No

You were not forced to buy a ticket to this and neither were you going to the theaters for a women crying on the remains of her dead son/husband.

Road,movie comes as a completely basic story line that has Vishnu(Abhay Deol) as a boy who goes through a certain phase revolving around poverty stricken, starving population of the deserts and ends the movie as a man.

The others are cameos, Satish Kaushik carves the way with super acting amidst the most gorgeous the deserts have ever looked ! 90 minutes are not very long and Road is more than worth it for within a certain number of years the main behind cinema will shift towards cinematography and art direction.This is the bible for those days.

overall a 7/10 || 8/10 and a pleasure watching the closest Bollywood has ever come to "El aura".

There are just four characters in the movie. Vishnu, played by Abhay Deol, wants to do more than just waste his time selling herbal oil as his father does before him. So, he volunteers for a friend to deliver across the desert an old truck which is a mobile cinema. The film is then about his journey, the movies that he plays & more importantly, the people that he meets on the way.

We have seen bits of brilliance from Satish Kaushik in the past, from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro to Calendar in Mr. India, but I think this is the one that he will be most remembered for as an actor. Cast as a veteran mechanic, Kaushik plays a central role in taking the movie in a different direction than the protagonist has planned to. He has been cast very well along with the little boy that Vishnu picks up early in his journey. Both these characters provide for the lighter moments in the film while also inducing some thought provoking dialogue. There is also scope for a female lead. A tribal whose husband was slain over a water dispute some years ago. As she mentions that she too wants to get lost in the magic of cinema, one can't help but wonder if there is a deeper meaning to this sentence. And this deep meaning dialogue is a standard feature of the film.

Wide angle views of the vastness of the desert that lead to nothingness in the desert and a set of women treading along for days in search of water are brilliantly executed. And, other than the road & the movies, they are a common string throughout the film.

The film exists at many levels. At the most superficial level, it appears to be a subtle comedy with situational jokes and a bit of slapstick too. You dig a little, and you find that it is a person's journey to finding himself by having to deal with an old truck, rough, dry weather and some people who have been through their share of pain & suffering and how they still manage to be at peace and look forward to some elusive tranquility.

Dig a little deeper and you find the film is about some inherent social problems that still affect most of rural & tribal India. That something as basic as water can be a reason for murder & arson is hard to imagine but it is brought to us with a lot of sensitivity. How the lead characters almost die of thirst, how they almost get killed for trying to steal water all help appreciate a problem that is alien to most of us.

Dig a bit more and we find that Indian cinema is trying to usher in the seemingly selfish directors who make films from the heart with a message that they want to send across to anyone who tries to understand their cinema. There is no plot in the movie that would build up into something big. For a film like this, there has to be no plot. Very few directors can do it and get away with it. It is a movie that should go down as one that shifted or at least tried to shift the paradigm of Indian cinema.

That said there is much that the director could do better explaining & elaborating a little. Like what is the protagonist actually wanting to do with the truck, how does a particular mela (caravan fair) disappear overnight and mostly, why such a brilliant film seem a bit too long even for its 95 minute run time.

It is most definitely a lesson in cinematographic excellence. One would just hope that it would be a complete movie in itself too.

Dev Benegal's 2009 film was premiered on Channel 4, where I saw it. Radio Times, in their lazy and scant review, described it as 'plays out like an Indian Cinema Paradiso set in the deserts of Rajasthan', which is only partly true.

Almost nothing can stand up to Cinema Paradiso, that being in my top 5 films of all time, but Road, Movie certainly has its charms. The centrepiece is a colourful, ageing truck that is also a mobile cinema. This van is the ticket to freedom for Vishnu, a restless young man, who wishing to escape being sucked into his father's hair oil business (yes, this is a gentle comedy) and he has a buyer for it; a museum in a town by the sea.

To get there, he treks across the desert (gravelly, but still tough) and his journey and the characters he meets, including the mechanic called upon very early (it HAD to be a temperamental van!) who becomes the projectionist and general fixer-up of everything. There's also a young lad, a runaway urchin. These two could be seen as the Philip Noiret character and the boy in Cinema Paradiso. Then a visually striking gypsy woman, who becomes a romantic distraction for Vishnu, is picked up when they run out of water and she has some.

Bollywood films are the most watched in the world, apparently and so obviously various flicks are shown in sprawling communities, projected onto the walls of dwellings and such.

Shot in deeply saturated colour and looking very attractive, it's not a deep, meaningful film but a nicely distracting, accessible one, nostalgic about long strips of celluloid and the joy that they can bring - and one that western audiences can easily appreciate and enjoy.

It looks like it's generally unavailable in the U.K, at least as a region 2 DVD. I only found this region 1 on Amazon by typing in the director's name and not the film's title - as that brought up hundreds of connotations, but not the right one.

Hopefully now, Channel 4's airing will have it released properly. It certainly deserves to be.