Road, Movie

Somewhere in the middle of the desert a destitute boy tries to impress the blase hero by mentioning the American coffee chain Starbucks. It is a moment that doesn’t quite ring true considering the chain hasn’t yet made its grand entry into the country and 99 per cent of the population, leave alone a poor boy, will not even know what it is all about. But then, would the film have had as much resonance with a foreign viewer who knows his Starbucks better than the rest of the brands? Well shot, fetching in its imagery, this could have been a nice fable on water and oil wars in rural and small-town India. But Road, Movie is let down by its outsider-like treatment of an Indian reality. It comes across as yet another attempt to package the Indian exotica for the West. Yes, the random clips of Hindi films might be there in the Cinema Paradiso-like sequence but our masses’ passion, craze, madness and nostalgia for films is not brought alive. So foreign is the sensibility that none of the characters, be it the sexy banjaran or the Salaam Balak Trust boy, feel real. Their personalities, interactions, motivations, relationships, lingo, conversations and even the body language, feel alien. Road, Movie is representative of a new kind of emerging Indian cinema. It tries to break new ground by steering clear of mainstream tradition. But all it does is replace it with a very western narrative and idiom. It’s hard to find the director’s distinct, individual voice here.