MIFF Play #7: HIT THE ROAD

A small family goes on a cross country drive. Middle aged parents, the man with a leg in a cast in the back, a young adult brother and a pre-teen one, and a dog making his way through his last days. It's Iran so when the wife turns around to her husband and says, "I think we're being followed," it might be something more than a road trip. So, while each one of them has different ideas about what they are doing they are more or less united but that doesn't mean it is going to run smooth. Each relationship within the four has its quirks and when numbers are added to cross each of those lines there are more nuances, rules to break or maintain, and communication to celebrate. The occasion is a sobering one but there's a lot of life just in this care to get in the way of that.

Road movies are dialogue and character and, though a series of pared back mini two-handers we are given the narrative arc and the family history. The mother has a photo album of her eldest son's urine stains from his infancy but the attempt at jollity by her only has him quietly weep at the wheel. The manic little boy's imagination is explosive but he has to be restrained from kissing the ground at each stop. Has the father's time in a leg cast gone beyond its real usefulness? The opening shot is of the younger boy playing the little keyboard someone has drawn on the cast, the correct notes of the piano piece that is playing on the score. There are frequent sudden songs, deliberately mimed in appearance a la Pennies from Heaven. What there isn't, to any dangerous degree, is the kind of sentimentalist whimsy of something like Little Miss Sunshine, even though the film does get very quirky. There is the sense that it has what it needs.

By no means a simple or simplistic tale, Hit the Road's leanness shines brightest when it does attempt something closer to cosmic like the father and son dialogue that morphs into a spacewalk. We know that most of it has stayed closer to a verite style family outing in the dust of the road or the mist of the mountains. And when loss and mortality take the stage it feels quietly inevitable rather than sudden and grasping. This was taken off the menu from last year's festival so it was wonderful to see it appear here. As it happens, it's out in select cinemas this week. Do yourself a favour.