The Road Movie (2017)

Theroadmovie

**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.

DIFF ’04: Tu

Here***/****starring Jasmin Telalovic, Marija Tadic, Zlatko Crnkovic, Ivo Gregurevicscreenplay by Josip Mlakic & Zrinko Ogrestadirected by Zrinko Ogresta by Walter Chaw Six loosely-connected vignettes form the body of Zrinko Ogresta's Croatian film Tu, a study in six parts of the difficulty of communication in a modern age (Hopper's eternal verities of nature and technology askew) and the scars left by the Balkan War on the lives of the collateral chaff. It opens with a simpleton at the mortar-torn front finding hope in the life of a bird that he saves, and ends with an old veteran unable to sleep because…

No Man’s Land (2001)

**½/****
starring Branko Djuric, Rene Bitorajac, Filip Sovagovic, Georges Siatidis
written and directed by Danis Tanovic

by Walter Chaw Chiki (Branko Djuric) is one of two surviving members of a front-line relief party that was decimated after their guide got them lost in a fog. (From the first, the visual metaphors fly as thick as pea soup.) His companion Cera (Filip Sovagovic), thought dead by the enemy, has been placed on a pressure-sensitive mine; his antagonist, Nino (Rene Bitorajac), has been disarmed and wounded. The three of them (four if you consider the mine a character) decry their causes while overlooking their similarities. No Man’s Land is at its best when it tantalizes with the possibility for resolution–and at its worst when it explodes the claustrophobia of its first hour to include the UN, the press, and a newsreel montage lending background to a conflict the movie’s only ostensibly about in the first place.