The Road Movie (2017)

**½/****
directed by Dmitrii Kalashnikov

by Alice Stoehr Dashboard-mounted cameras are surveillance tools. They can prove who’s at fault in an accident, counter insurance scams, and record run-ins with the police; in the corruption-riddled nation of Russia especially, they’ve become widespread as legal safeguards. But the footage they capture can also double as entertainment. For what, in the whole history of moviegoing, has stimulated a viewer’s lizard brain better than a car crash? In The Road Movie, documentarian Dmitrii Kalashnikov has compiled dozens of clips shot by his countrymen on dashcams and uploaded to video-hosting websites. Their lengths range from a few seconds to a few minutes, and the events they document are unpredictable, but they all share the same vantage point: gazing through a windshield onto the road. The director’s input is subtle. He’s present mostly in the curation and arrangement of the videos, with signs of trimming here and there. Kalashnikov achieves a seamless flow that keeps the film’s 70 minutes from growing monotonous. So, for example, during one stretch a cloud of smoke pours from a burning bus; runaway horses block a car’s progress through the snow; then a driver ricochets off a snowbank and right into oncoming traffic. Kalashnikov doesn’t impose any context on them, so that task falls to the vehicles’ occupants, whose faces usually go unseen and whose subtitled chatter is only sporadically relevant to the scene in the road.

Though the assortment of videos is eclectic, certain trends emerge. Like rough weather–severe rainstorms and harsh winters, both hazardous in traffic, recur throughout. The vignettes are divided about evenly between the country and the city. Though locations aren’t labelled, the cars’ surroundings provide some rough impressions of Russian geography. Highways stretch through expanses of hill and forest. (The latter, in one instance, is fully aflame.) Streets run between tall, narrow, and seemingly ubiquitous apartment buildings. Many of the stories here involve Good Samaritans who pull over to help those hurt or stranded, but many more involve bad behaviour. Road rage leads to a fistfight; assailants climb on the hoods of strangers’ cars; a woman with a lighter ignites a gas pump. At a few points, Kalashnikov even inserts little montages of his juiciest material, one of them highlighting moments of collision, another from the perspective of cars as they overturn. No one’s visibly injured in the clips themselves, but they still impart the sneaky thrill that comes with watching a real-life disaster. At its most exploitative, The Road Movie aspires to the sensationalism of mondo filmmaking. The dashcam framing, however, both inhibits and enhances the film. Because the camera’s static, it’s more objective than handheld. It’s incapable of gawking. Instead, its field of vision is bound to the car, whether said car is upright or upside-down or afloat in a river. The only creative decision each of these motorists made was to mount the camera, then turn it on. The rest is happenstance. It’s a matter of one driver happening past a parachutist’s descent while another chances upon a galloping bear. This element of serendipity makes the handful of police chases here feel almost like cheating.

The videos’ origins as surveillance footage shape their spare aesthetic. The timestamps that cling to the corner of the frame may not be pretty, but they are an aspect of the naked reality reproduced on screen. The camera’s angle, level and direct, yields some rich compositions while also displacing action into off-screen sound and space. This inadvertent artistry faintly recalls the work of the late Abbas Kiarostami or, perhaps more relevant, the 2014 masterpiece “Camera falls from airplane and lands in pig pen–MUST WATCH END!!” Like that minute-and-a-half YouTube video caught by a tumbling GoPro, these clips raise questions of authorship. Kalashnikov may have appropriated them and directed the film as a whole, but he didn’t shoot anything himself. Yet when a car flips in a head-on crash, and the dashcam stares poignantly at a splintered windshield, driver shuddering audibly behind it, who authored that? The Road Movie never explicitly broaches this or any other question; it just carries on in astonishment with its grab bag of vehicular mishegoss. Implicitly, though, all these miniature dramas suggest that any crossroads in Russia might well be the site of something droll or shocking or spectacular.