That might be a protracted justification for entertainment that’s in the same ballpark as, say, Roadrunner cartoons, but it goes a long way of explaining the base appeal of “The Road Movie.” Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s debut feature is a 70-minute compilation of these dashcam videos uploaded to the Internet by Russian citizens. These videos run the gamut from manic car accidents to utterly surreal encounters. Kalashnikov, who serves as the film’s editor, selects videos that have their own internal rhythm, yet they all follow a familiar structure: a calm, then a storm, and then the aftermath. “The Road Movie” operates on a unique tonal wavelength, one that’s both manic and oddly comforting. It may be an anthology of bedlam, but it eventually settles into a calming mode that derives from a director providing his audience exactly what they signed up to watch.
Describing any of the clips in “The Road Movie” at length will inevitably do a great disservice to the experience of actually watching them, especially since they’re predicated upon shock and awe. However, some of the highlights from the film include a drunken joy ride that lands a car in a river (“We are sailing,” one passenger calmly states as the vehicle floats downstream), a humorous yet mundane conversation between a taxi driver and prostitute about fee structure, and a car chase in which the police are downright incapable of quartering their suspect. Each “scene” has its own identity, but when juxtaposed against similar events, they become a tapestry of the absurd.
Maybe it goes without saying, but “The Road Movie” is very funny, albeit in the pitch-black sense. Much of the humor comes from the passengers’ po-faced narration to disorder just outside their window, or casual asides right before an accident, such as when a driver remarks, “Man, it’s not even stylish … to wear a sombrero in the car” just before another car crashes inches away from them. It’s not quite accurate to say that “The Road Movie” demands that you laugh at people’s pain, but it does ask the audience to treat the bizarre with a certain amount of levity, even if the surrounding reality is fairly disturbing.
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