Alia Bhatt in a still from Highway
"In bondage, she found freedom." That's the tagline in the trailer for the Hindi movie Highway, and it makes you wonder if the film will be appalling or merely clueless.
It's neither, although it has tone trouble as it searches for a genre to contain a story with built-in believability problems.
The "she" who finds freedom is Veera (Alia Bhatt), a rich urbanite whose wedding preparations we see in the first, claustrophobic scenes. "Let's run away," she tells her strait-laced fiance. He's willing to go for a drive but warns of the dangers of leaving the city.
And lo and behold, the minute she steps out of his fancy car at a gas station in Nowheresville, bandits nab her.
The director, Imtiaz Ali (Rockstar), doesn't soft-pedal the violence of Veera's kidnapping or the rough treatment she receives at her abductors' hands. She's gagged and bound and slapped and tossed in the back of an old truck. One of the kidnappers gropes her.
Bhatt convincingly shows us the fear in Veera's eyes and her hopelessness. She escapes briefly, running herself ragged on a salt flat under a star-speckled sky. "Where am I?" croons the singer on the soundtrack.
The naturalism and violence (and threat of rape) in these scenes make them an uncomfortable prelude to what comes next: a love story.
Suddenly, Veera is not afraid. "Maybe I've lost my mind," she says, and maybe she has. She begins to fall for the brooding, monosyllabic Mahabir (Randeep Hooda), one of her kidnappers.
At this point, Highway morphs, sort of, into a lighter, slightly more comic film, a road movie with plentiful scenery, some dancing and some yuks. But a dark undertow remains. The fact of the abduction means that a creepiness hovers over the romance, which has other obstacles to overcome, most important the class difference. If the road seems romantic to Veera ("I don't want to get to where we're going"), it's only a dead end to Mahabir, a poor man on the run.
The cinematographer Anil Mehta's lovely, unfussy images ground the film and show us a good bit of India. (It was shot in Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Kashmir.) Ali's story, though, wanders too long and too far, sometimes coming off like a forced mash-up of It Happened One Night and Patty Hearst. No wonder the film can't sustain a tone, wavering between realism and Bollywood hokum.
Bhatt has an openness and emotional transparency that help make her character something more than a screenwriter's bad idea, even if you never quite believe that she's attracted to Mahabir. Hooda fares less well, though he has the movie's best scene:
In the mountains, Mahabir and Veera find a little cabin, which Veera proceeds to spiff up. Mahabir peers through the door but can't go in. He turns his back, crying. He tries to enter again. Soon, he's sobbing. The picture of domestic bliss is too much for him.
"I'll never have this," he says, and you know he's right. It's as if he were tossing cold water onto the movie's moony fantasizing. Freedom, he reminds us, isn't always an option.
