The Hindustan Times: There’s something about road movies that taps into every human being’s desire to escape, to the extent that we’re willing to watch two mismatched souls transport a dead body across south India, and even a curmudgeonly old man have diarrhoea on the highway. We’re willing to watch a family take their young daughter to a beauty contest across the country and we’re willing to follow a deranged Kazakh ‘journalist’ expose America’s most shameful secrets.
There’s a road movie for everyone, because everyone, in their own way, can relate to the feeling of being somewhere else, of travelling to unknown destinations, meeting new people along the way, and having to deal with unplanned shenanigans.
Karwaan, which released this week, is a terrific road movie, mostly because it’s so much more than that. Like the best films about clashing personalities trapped in a moving vehicle for long periods of time, Karwaan hurtles through dense emotional territory and takes its characters on a journey of self-discovery.
Listing great road movies is a relatively easy task – easier than, say, listing films about neo-Nazis. But here’s the thing: As with every genre, the popular road movies are really popular. So it makes no sense to repeat them here. Which is why the opening couple of paragraphs alluded to some of the most acclaimed road movies of recent times, films such as Piku (which also stars Karwaan’s Irrfan Khan), Little Miss Sunshine, Into the Wild, Borat and Almost Famous.
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