Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, August 09, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Hitcher meets It Happened One Night! Road was the second Bollywood movie I watched without subtitles, and I retained a real fondness for the flick (in part because of starlet Antra Mali's awesome stomach muscles). So when I found a used DVD for sale at the Indian nail salon across from the Naz Super 8, I was all over it.Now, even without subtitles, it was easy to tell Road was far from a superior Bollywood picture. Clearly derivative as hell, it was badly paced, way too short, and had at least one utterly unnecessary musical number (a fat guy in a headband and sleeveless jumpsuit who looks like a Pakistani Frank Stallone bounces around with a kinda hot older chick who dresses like a belly dancer and dry humps like a heat-exhausted stripper). But the musical numbers had pep, the plot was ripped off in large part from The Hitcher, it was far racier than any Bollywood flick I had seen by that point, and ooo baby, those stomach muscles. (A more clueful observer of the Bollywood scene than myself could point out how Road in many ways was a precursor to the ultra-modern Bollywood flick annoying reviewers in cinemas today with its reliance of Hollywood plots and "adult" material. But I'm not gonna bother with it because (a) I'm not knowledgeable enough to make such an argument interesting; and (b) I'm sure ignorant, lustful yahoos like me supporting trash like Road are part of the problem.) So how does Road stack up now, with English subtitles and the gloomy knowledge of Bollywood's dismal situation? I guess I haven't come very far on the ignorant, lustful yahoo front because I thought it was, once again, enjoyably disposable trash. Arvind and Lakshmi are a passionate young couple who argue a lot and dance and sing almost as much. In a sign of youthful disfunction, Arvind suggests that he and Lakshmi elope and drive cross-country to surprise Lakshmi's father, an important cop in a distant province. They hit the road in their spiffy SUV, get lost in the desert wastes between Delhi and the province, and pick up Babu, a few miles after seeing his broken down car by side of the road. Of course, Babu is from classic film hitchiker mode, somebody with an off-center charm who isn't quite right in the head who moves from puckish to rude to dangerous in very short order. After taking the SUV and Lakshmi at gunpoint, Babu repays Arvind's kindness by dropping him in the middle of nowhere, and forcing Arvind to fight not just for survival, but to save the woman he loves. Somewhere in there we get one steamy musical number (Arvind and Lakshmi check into a hotel number and dance around in super-skimpy outfits while singing about their virginity) one extraneous musical number (see the chubby Mr. Headband, above), and one almost Lynchian musical number (Babu's musical number is filled with spotlights, shadow figures, disquieting editing and accompaniment by a beaten, bleeding hostage), and your usual car crashes, motorcycle chases, inept police forces chasing the wrong guy type stuff you get in this kind of movie. A few things become more clear with the subtitles, interestingly. Like a lot of the new Bollywood "adult" flicks, Road tries to have it both ways, with its smutty modern ways being clucked at by its dowager-friendly theme--if I parse it right, the filmmakers draw comparisons between Babu's rudeness and violence with Arvind & Lakshmi's choice to elope--an act that the movie portrays as literally rude and understatedly paints as disrespectful and rude. In several scenes, Babu is described as "more honest" and "more truthful" than Arvind or Lakshmi because, even though he'll will kill a stranger for their car, he treats Lakshmi with utter respect at all times and talks about the importance of "respectful" relationships with her. Another big change is that Babu, instead of being your typical road-traveling serial killer, a la Rutger Hauer in The Hitcher, is merely a criminal, a thug working for a crime boss who sees a chance to rip off his boss and ends up with everything going badly. The broken down car by the side of the road doesn't contain murdered innocents, it's his partner in crime who he had to kill when things went south. The difference takes a little bit of the bloody fun out of Road for me, but sets up potentially bigger payoffs that, sadly, never get close to coming to pass. Since neither Vivek Oberoi (as Arvind) or Antara Mali (as Lakshmi) have one-half Manoj Bajpai's (Babu) talent Road fails for the ambiguity I think it strives for in its last third: Babu begins courting Lakshmi while kidnapping her, and his guesses as to Arvind and Lakshmi's relationship is accurate enough that when he starts suggesting that Arvind's intention in proposing elopement was an attempt to get some pre-marital nookie, there's room for some genuine ambiguity in the movie. Although Lakshmi flirts back with Babu and admits her attraction to him when he presses her about it, the audience, sadly, doesn't doubt that she's doing it because she has to. But if Mali had been a better actress, things might have been more interesting: is Lakshmi playing Babu, or is she really seeing in this guy the type of respectful outlaw she really wants? Simiarly, although Arvind is exactly the poser with a motorcycle and macho pre-beard Babu paints him as, at no point does Oberoi play him as anything other than an honorable guy--there's absolutely no chance that Arvind is playing Lakshmi to get into her pants. And, ultimately, who is the movie trying to kid? It's a Bollywood picture--of course, the couple's love is true and the villain is nothing more than snake! But with a bit more actual talent and effort on the part of Oberoi and Mitra, there might have been some actual tension to the non-crashing, non-shooting, non-stomach wiggling, non-Pakistani Frank Stallone scenes. Road is fun trash, but it's not good trash, and that's kind of sad. It makes it much harder to endorse and to loan. posted by Jeff Lester | 2:46 PM | |
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