Road movie
[2] Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence,[3] a "distinctly existential air"[4] and is populated by restless, "frustrated, often desperate characters".
[5] The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters.
[15] US road movies depict the wide open, vast spaces of the highways as symbolizing the "scale and notionally utopian" opportunities to move up upwards and outwards in life.
[17] For example, in It Happened One Night (1934), a wealthy woman who goes on the road is liberated from her elite background and marriage to an immoral husband when she meets and experiences hospitality from regular, good-hearted Americans who she never would have met in her previous life, with middle America depicted as a utopia of "real community".
[8] Other Australian road movies include Peter Weir's The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), about a small town where the inhabitants cause road accidents to salvage the vehicles; the biker film Stone (1974) by Sandy Harbutt, about a biker gang who witness a political cover-up murder; The (1981) thriller Roadgames by Richard Franklin, about a truck driver who tracks down a serial killer in the Australian outback; Dead-end Drive-in (1986) by Brian Trenchard-Smith, about a dystopian future where drive-in theatres are turned into detention centres; Metal Skin (1994) by Geoffrey Wright about a street racer; and Kiss or Kill (1997) by Bill Bennett, a film noir-style road movie.
[8] Asian-Canadian filmmakers have made road films about the experience of Canadians of Asian origin, such as Ann Marie Fleming's The Magical Life of Long Tak Sam, which is about her search for her "Chinese grandfather, an itinerant magician and acrobat".
[30] Wender's road movies "filter nomadic excursions through a pensive Germanic lens" and depict "somber drifters coming to terms with their internal scars".
[32] Neil Archer states that French and other Francophone (e.g., Belgium, Switzerland) road films focus on "displacement and identity", notably in regards to maghrebin immigrants and young people (e.g., Yamina Benguigui's Inch'Allah Dimanche (2001), Ismaël Ferroukhi's La Fille de Keltoum (2001) and Tony Gatlif's Exils (2004).
[33] More broadly, European films are tending to use imagery of border-crossing and focusing on "marginal identities and economic migration", which can be seen in Lukas Moodysson's Lilja 4-ever (2002), Michael Winterbottom's In This World (2002) and Ulrich Seidl's Import/Export (2007).
[39] The images in the film are blend of homage to US road movie conventions (gas stations, billboards) and "recognizable Spanish types", such as the "embittered drunkard".
[8] Latin American road movies are usually about a cast of characters, rather than a couple or single person, and the films explore the differences between urban and rural regions and between north and south.
[8] Luis Buñuel's Subida al Cielo (Mexican Bus Ride, 1951), is about a poor rural person's trip into a big city to help his mother, who is dying.
Rachel Dwyer, a reader in world cinema at the University of London-Department of South Asia, marked Varma's contribution into the new-age film noir.
[51][52] In Karwaan, the protagonist is forced to set out on a road trip from Bengaluru to Kochi after he loses his father in an accident, but the body delivered to him is of the mother of a woman in another state.
[53] Ryan Gilbey of The Guardian was broadly positive about Zoya Akhtar's Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara; he wrote, "It's still playing to full houses, and you can see why.
[57] The Good Road is told in a hyperlink format, where several stories are intertwined, with the center of the action being a highway in the rural lands of Gujarat near a town in Kutch.
Monsieur Poulet (1977, Niger); The Train of Salt and Sugar (2016, Mozambique); Hayat (2016, Morocco); Touki Bouki (1973, Senegal) and Borders (2017, Burkina Faso).
[5] Laderman states that Women in Love particularly lays the groundwork for the future road films, as it showed a couple who rebelled against social norms by leaving their familiar location and going on an aimless, meandering journey.
[5] The movie version of the novel, made a year later, depicts the hungry, weary family's travel on Route 66 using "montage sequences, reflected images of the road on windshields and mirrors", and shots taken from the driver's point of view to create a sense of movement and place.
"[62] In the film, an unusual group of travellers, including a banker, prostitute, escaped prisoner and a military officer's wife, move through the dangerous desert trails.
[15] The on-the-road plot was used at the birth of American cinema but blossomed in the years after World War II, reflecting a boom in automobile production and the growth of youth culture.
Early road movies have been criticized by some progressives for their "casual misogyny", "fear of otherness", and for not examining issues such as power, privilege, and gender [62] and for mostly showing white people.
[8] Timothy Corrigan states that post-WW II, the genre of road films became more codified, with features solidifying such as the use of characters experiencing "amnesia, hallucinations and theatrical crisis".
[68] Road movies were an important genre in the late 1960s and 1970s era of the New Hollywood, with films such as Terrence Malick's Badlands and Richard Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971) showing an influence from Bonnie and Clyde.
[6] From the 1930s to 1960s, merely showing a man and woman on a road trip was exciting for audience, as all the motel stays and closeness had implied, yet deferred, consummation of the sexual attraction between the characters (sex could not be depicted due to the Motion Picture Production Code).
[6] With Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Natural Born Killers (1994), the heterosexual couple are united by their involvement in murder; as well, with jail hanging over their heads, there can be no return to domestic life at the end of the film.
[5] Road movies have been called a post-WW II genre, as they track key post-war cultural trends, such as the breakup of the traditional family structure, in which male roles were destabilized; there is focus on menacing events which impact the characters who are on the move; there is an association between the character and the mode of transportation being used (e.g., a car or motorcycle), with the car symbolizing the self in the modern culture; and there is usually a focus on men, with women typically being excluded, creating a "male escapist fantasy linking masculinity to technology".
[74] In the 2000s, a new crop of road movies was produced, including Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny (2003), Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004), Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers (2005) and Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy (2006) and scholars are taking more interest in examining the genre.
[76] The BFI's top 10 include Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), which used "mostly non-professional actors"; Alfonso Cuarón's Y tu mamá también (2001), about Mexican teens on the road; The Brown Bunny (2003), which garnered publicity for its "infamous fellatio scene"; Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), about Che Guevera's epic motorcycle trip; Mark Duplass and Jay Duplass' The Puffy Chair (2005), the "first mumblecore road movie"; Broken Flowers (2005); Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' Little Miss Sunshine (2006), about a family's trip in a VW camper van; Old Joy (2006); Alexander Payne's Nebraska (2013), which depicts a father and son on a road trip; Steven Knight's Locke (2013), about a construction executive taking stressful calls on a road trip; and Jafar Panahi's Taxi Tehran (2015), about a cab driver ferrying strange passengers around the city.
[5] Atkinson calls contemporary road movies an "ideogram of human desire and a last-ditch search for self" designed for an audience that was raised watching TV, particularly open-ended serial programs.
