The title, Road, Movie, plays on a genre that has become one of Hollywood's most cliché-driven product lines. Fortunately, the film by Dev Bengal is a road picture of superior horsepower and a kind of Cinema Paradiso on wheels.
Beautifully filmed and composed in the nearly empty, Martian deserts of Rajasthan and Kutch, Road, Movie's protagonist, Vishu, is a young Indian on an unanticipated journey of discovery. Bored with his father's preposterous hair oil business and his family's veneer of traditionalism as well as the dull entrepreneurial culture of the "New India," Vishnu sets off on a working vacation. He offers to drive his uncle's 1942 Chevy truck, painted turquoise and rigged up as a cinema, across the country for sale to a museum. He is indifferent to the nostalgia of the mobile projection booths that once brought movies to India's impoverished hinterlands are now historical relics. Soon enough, Vishnu finds that India cannot easily escape the worst of its history and should not ignore the best.
Road, Movie's bittersweet comedy begins with Vishnu as a selfish jerk and ends after he learned a few lessons from the strangers he met on the road. Namely: what we give is a measure of our humanity. Vishnu has no intention of actually showing the ragbag collection of pre-1980 Bollywood stored in the truck, but finds there are still dream worlds to conjure in those flickering images projected in the dark. Road, Movie is out on DVD.
