These
are the folks who keep voting for Putin. In addition to trading Olympic hosting
duties with China, Russia should also become the permanent home of the Darwin
Awards. At least viewers could jolly well come to that conclusion after
watching this compilation of Russian dash-cam footage. In any event, the
spectacularly crackheaded vehicular misbehavior is never dull to behold in
Dimitrii Kalashnikov’s The Road Movie (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.
To
be fair, the snowy Russian winters do not do motorists any favors. There are
indeed plenty of clips featuring cars and tractor-trailers gliding gracefully towards
the recording dash-cam car, like a figure skater. Then there is also the woman
who used a butane lighter to illuminate her gas tank while pumping petrol.
Gasoline plus open flame. You do the math.
Most
of the footage assembled in Road Movie fits
somewhere on the spectrum between Jackass
and the particularly horrifying 1960s driver’s ed industrial films, like Dice in a Box (which explained how vans
are basically death traps on wheels). Yet, just when you think it isn’t
political, Kalashnikov shows about a dozen SWAT-style cops shaking down an
unlucky dash-cam owner in an apparently bogus traffic stop. How much could they
possibly hope to extort from him—a few thousand rubles? They really ought to be
more ambitious in their corruption.
Moments
like that elevate Road Movie beyond
an online super-cut. Serving as his own editor, Kalashnikov (fittingly, like
the assault rifle) has a shrewd eye for tension and telling details. The frequent
presence of words like “b*tch” and “f*g” are surely no coincidence, but an
effort to reflect street level attitudes. Seriously, these are the people who
tampered with our election? That’s truly terrifying. Yet, nobody can blame him
for what found its way into the film. The dash-cam has a fixed, unfiltered
perspective. How you enter its field of vision is on you.
Road Movie clocks in at a
mere sixty-nine minutes, but a concept like this could easily turn lame if it
were conspicuously padded. Kalashnikov gives it enough of veneer of
sociological inquiry to make this massive exercise in rubber-necking feel
respectable. Indeed, it is often a literal traffic wreck that we can’t turn
away from. Recommended for mayhem seekers and anyone perversely curious about
the state of the world, The Road Movie opens
this Friday (1/19) in New York, at the Quad Cinema downtown and the AMC Empire in
Midtown.