I originally was not going to include The Road Movie in my lineup of full reviews for True/False. I’m reviewing about 2/3 of the films I see, and I want to make sure the ones I highlight are worth talking about and will be of interest to Reel Spirituality readers. I wasn’t convinced at first that this was true of The Road Movie, which exclusively features footage, spliced together by director Dmitrii Kalashnikov, pulled from uploaded YouTube videos recorded by dashcams in Russia – where many people use these cameras to record for insurance and police purposes.
Some have raised the valid question of whether this method of filmmaking is particularly difficult, especially considering the somewhat inscrutable organizational patterns of the film. It’s not clear whether some master narrative is meant to emerge from the images, or if they are put together more randomly. I decided to write about the film here anyway, because even if it isn’t the most daring film conceptually or aesthetically, there’s something thematically very interesting that emerges when watching an hour plus of these images.
The footage featured in The Road Movie mostly consists of crashes. Lots and lots of crashes. Industrial trucks tip over. Cars careen across the icy Russian highways. Buses explode. Tanks try to go through drive in car washes. At one point a whole forest catches on fire. The usual. But Kalashnikov also highlights mayhem of a more human nature. When cars crash into each other, or even just cut each other off, this often results in altercations between drivers. A surprising number of these altercations involve axes being pulled from cars. One terrifying video shows a man jump on the hood of a woman’s car, begin beating the hood, and cling on even as she tries to drive off, terrified.
Out of this mass of carnage a theme emerges, if you look closely. The most striking thing about these videos is not the destruction itself, but how many feature multiple cars and pedestrians rushing past the scene of accidents and altercations in order to get on with their own business. Only a handful of people across the whole film try to help those in need, and even those who do seem to do so reluctantly. An air of suspicion and cynicism pervades most of the clips, and though Kalashnikov never intervenes to say it, there’s a clear critique here of a society that has lost a sense of the common good. The audience is not absolved of responsibility; I (and almost everyone else in the theater) took a clear cathartic pleasure in the suffering of others. Amidst its explosions, The Road Movie prompts us to ask ourselves that age old question – Who is my neighbor? – and to ponder how we might serve others in public spaces.
