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.
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.