Diaries of the road
Road movies belong to a special category where a journey often takes on metaphorical meanings. Shoma A. Chatterji explores the nuances of this genre of films

Road movies are a cinematic genre in which the action takes places during a road journey or a vehicle-based film. The genre name is also taken as the title of the 1974 film Road Movie by Joseph Strick. The road movie has its roots in earlier tales of epic journeys such as Homer’s Odyssey and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Bunty Aur Bubbly offers a microcosm of the global Indian through the two characters
Bunty Aur Bubbly offers a microcosm of the global Indian through the two characters.

The Wild One
Stills from The Wild One and (below) Bonnie and Clyde

Bonnie and Clyde

They began as uniquely post-World War II metaphors, reflecting the boom of USA’s postwar automobility and youth culture. It came into its own only in the 1960s with films like Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde and later, Thelma and Louise. Earlier films such as The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause focused more on mobility than on the road, but they were important influences all the same.

The conception of the road movie monopolised by America has been appropriated, imbibed, deconstructed and then redefined long ago by the cinema of other countries, including India.

Two best road movies of all time, however, are not from Hollywood. One is Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), while the other is La Strada (1954), directed by none other than the Italian master Federico.

Coming to India, can Bunty Aur Bubbly be labelled as a road movie? Yes, it can be, though it doesn’t really identify with the Indian ethos. It is a frothier and lighter version of the American Bonny and Clyde. Yet, it defines its hybrid Indian identity that offers a microcosm of the global Indian through the two characters Bunty and Bubbly with costumes, props, disguises and language changes.

What begins as a con game for two master tricksters evolves into a journey through life for the two protagonists who fall in love, get married and also beget a child. Mahesh Bhatt’s box office hit Dil Hai Ke Maanta Nahin starring Pooja Bhatt and Amir Khan however, was more along the lines of the Hollywood genre of road movies as it was a straight plagiarisation of the old Cary Grant-starrer It Happened One Night.

Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge is a strikingly different version of a road movie where love between the girl and the boy grows over their adventures across countries and then settles down to stability when they realise their love for each other and the girl is to be married off to a man of her father’s choice. Halfway through its footage, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s musical blockbuster, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, dramatically changes from a clich`E9 musical family melodrama into a road movie, defining a radical change in the relationships between and among the three protagonists of the film.

A road movie is just not a physical journey of the main characters across given geographical spaces. Nor is it necessarily linked to a journey by car, or train or ship. It begins with a journey that is destined to proceed from point A to point B but loses track somewhere along the way to reach somewhere other than point Bphysical terms, in metaphorical terms, and often, even in philosophical terms. The best example of this kind of road movie in India is Vijay Anand’s Guide (1966) based on R.K. Narayan’s novel of the same name.

The film is a lush allegory comprising paradoxically-paired themes of, on the one hand, nation-building, modernisation, and social reform, and, on the other, world-renunciation and spiritual self-realisation—enduring preoccupations of contemporary Indian culture. Dev Anand stars as the effervescent Raju, a fast-talking, self-promoting tourist guide in the Rajasthani city of Udaipur, who, in course of time, turns into a successful promoter of Rosie-turned-Nalini, the classical dancer he fell in love with. In this journey of transformations, we finally journey along with him through his accidental transformation into a "mahatma" worshipped by illiterate villagers. There is continuity, a development in his character—from the shrewd, glib-tongued man of the world of the opening to the near-saint at death.

The road reveals an absence of moral virtues, it exposes people to their bare essentials and philosophy is often the outcome when men leave the comfort of what they know for the unexplored. This does not really ring true of the Indian road movie. Take for instance Satyajit Ray’s Nayak. The film-star hero of the film is going to Delhi to receive the National Award. His secretary has failed to get air bookings so he is forced to get into the Rajdhani Express. Irritated with the unwanted attention of fellow-commuters, he shifts to the dining car. He chances upon Aditi, the editor of a woman’s magazine who is going to Delhi to receive a grant for her magazine. The physical and geographical journey changes into a journey of introspection for the hero and of discovery for the journalist. To celebrate their brief bonding, Aditi tears up the sheets on which she has noted the interview she took and when the engine chugs into Delhi, the two part ways.

Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s Swapner Din, premiered at the Kolkata Film Festival recently, is a brilliant road movie that captures the entire expanse of a journey that begins predictably with the hero, an ordinary man who travels into the interiors of West Bengal with a projector and his driver for company to screen family planning films for the village audience. But a sudden change in circumstances changes the course of his life and also that of the driver and of the pregnant Muslim girl they offered a lift to along the way. The hero loses his projector, then the jeep and finally, the substitute driver who turned into a friend and accomplice as the three try to cross the Indian border to step into Bangladesh, not knowing what the future has in store.

Rajat Mukherjee’s Road (2002) produced by Ram Gopal Verma is about a couple whose life changes when the two decide to give a lift to a man on the road. It turns out that he is a killer. The character of Babu, the killer, suggests the breakdown of the family structure in Hindi cinema in one sense, reflecting the rootlessness of modern-day young lovers represented in the characters of Arvind and Lakshmi. Theirs is not a journey into the ‘self’ as many Indian road movies go to define. Yet, one cannot slight the importance of the film in view of the fact that it signifies on the one hand, the increasing mobility of the urban Indian and on the other, the restive spirit of a willfully ‘orphaned’ youth. Is it a journey into the self? Or, is it a process of discovery through relationships created, sustained and destroyed? The Indian road movie has indeed come of age, signifying perhaps, the journey of life across rocky roads and individual terrains inhabited by people who may be liberally termed, the ‘outsiders.’— TWF





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