IMDb listing
Los Angeles Times (R. Abele) review
New York Times (T. Bugbee) review
RogerEbert.com (V. Murthi) review
The Road Movie [2016] (directed by Dmitrii Kalashnikov) is a guilty pleasure of a movie (though also informative in its own way). A documentary made entirely from Russian dashcam video clips, the film quite literally becomes a "window to a world" that most Viewers, certainly from the West, would not particularly know. The "limits of the genre" (dashcam videos) and subgenre (dashcam videos that generally younger youtube / "vkontakte" ... "OMG that really happened (to us)..." savy Russians" would find compelling) necessarily present a Russia of mayhem ("OMG, these people are crazy...") BUT also a Russia that most of us here would not know ("OMG, THERE IS a LOT OF SNOW in Russia" ;-) // "OMG, I didn't fully appreciate / realize that Russia today, like any other modern country, would have a lot of cars / roads even out in the countryside." Honestly, these last two points, I did not really appreciate until seeing this film).
So I have to say that this movie, in as much as one could catch it at an "art-house cinema" somewhere in the West, or later, on DVD / streaming video on Amazon / Netflix , perhaps Vimeo, etc, is worth the trouble of seeing. This is because Russia, as important a country that it is in the world, remains quite inaccessible. The Russian movies that do make it to Western theaters are often limited in theme, generally ponderous Epics or perhaps like this one of a sullen, "Road Warrior" bent.
There's of course a much larger Russian film industry than that which makes films portraying Russians as sad / depressed "Ana Karenina"-like victims or as "tough, even frightening people (Stalingrad survivors and children / grandchildren of Stalingrad survivors) who one would NOT want to mess with." But those films -- including Russian comedies [1] [2], RomComs, Twilight Saga-like YA romances [1] [2], and tech-savy YA adventure stories -- are often hard to find... in the West. For a couple of years, I tried offering an annual "Russian Film Tour" on my blog, offering Readers here an opportunity to see more of Russia than the scary and or depressed. But this year, it proved hard to find subtitle files (even to machine translate into English) for such films.
I FIND THIS UNFORTUNATE because while I do understand that Putin's Regime MAY FEEL that the West has fundamentally underestimated / dismissed Russia as "backward" and therefore MAY FEEL that "if we can't be LOVED, then let us at least be FEARED" (hence the Russian-end promotion into the West of their more PONDEROUS and often FEARSOME films).
However, I do honestly believe that taking the other tack -- presenting Russians as REGULAR PEOPLE who LOVE, ARE FUNNY, PLAY VIDEO GAMES -- would be better for all concerned and, honestly, support the cause of World Peace. For honestly, if Russians are portrayed simply as "stalkers of ghostly Tiger Tanks" or survivors of "a REAL (WW II-era) Hunger Games," then this just SCARES PEOPLE and makes them _less likely_ to want to interact with Russians in a positive way. I think it'd be much better to encourage people to remember that Russians (like ALL PEOPLE) have ... MOMS who love them like our moms love us.
Anyway, I quite enjoyed the current film, entirely composed of clips from Russian dashcam videos. I just wish we could see MUCH MORE OF RUSSIA than just these quite limited clips.
* Foreign language webpages are most easily translated using Google's Chrome Browser.
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