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Road, Movie (DVD)
Year: 2010
Rating: M
Director: Dev Benegal
Cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Abhay Deol, Mohammed Faisal
Release Date: April 06, 2011
Distributor: Madman
The Film: 3.0
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5“...settles into a low-key, unpretentious road drama.”
The Indian film Road, Movie is a film that engages and entertains despite its structural issues and problems with tone.
With its strange, epileptic title, Road, Movie quickly announces its unfocused identity as a film. Is it a road film about the creation of a surrogate family? A Cinema Paradiso-style homage to the power of the film medium? A coming-of-age love story set to the backdrop of the Indian desert?
Ultimately, Dev Benegal's film is all of those things, and none. Just as Vishnu (Abhay Deol) - a young man who must transport his father's hair care products to a museum - meets a series of increasingly eccentric characters on his journey, so too do the filmmakers attempt to throw in a few new ideas and dramatic concepts every twenty minutes or so.
Benegal does not attempt to flesh out any of these characters in a particularly meaningful or refreshing way, as he tries to avoid this by providing - and then quickly resolving - a new conflict for Vishnu in periodic episodes.
Regardless of these issues, the film does entertain. Ignoring the grittier ambitions of higher-tier storytellers like Mira Nair and Shekhar Kapoor, the film settles into a low-key, unpretentious road drama.
