And Freedom “Free” Jack and Poppy Corn are as amusing as they are uniquely named. Her admittedly weird traveling mates, ones with a rich and entangled history, are the distraction she sorely needs from her own problems. Teresa indeed says “Bill was one of the reasons she was running away,” but she also adds he was “not her only one, nor her biggest.”Ī naïve driver giving a lift to strangers hardly ends well in fiction, but Teresa feels lost and lonely. Of course there is always more to the story than meets the eye. All readers really know so far is this 18-year-old is upset about something her (ex) boyfriend Bill did, and she thinks running off will make her feel better and him worse. And the inciting incident causing Teresa Chafey to suddenly take off is unclear until the last couple of chapters. In typical Pike fashion, Road to Nowhere starts off near the middle rather than at the beginning. The path ahead of her is unclear, but one thing’s for sure - Teresa’s life will never be the same after she picks up two hitchhikers along the way. Christopher Pike ’s 1993 novel puts its troubled protagonist behind the wheel and shadows her every move and thought as she drives along the California coast one fateful night. But if you want to wander off-road, into the mysterious and inexplicable Zone (to quote from Tarkovsky's STALKER) where nothing is as it seems - then Monte Hellman's ROAD TO NOWHERE is for you.In spite of its title, Road to Nowhere has a conclusive ending. If you're looking for an easy ride, then you should probably look elsewhere. Escher here, like walking up a staircase only to find yourself at the bottom of another staircase, and another. What's left is Hellman's portrait of monstrous artistic obsession and some of his most intense and erotically-charged filmmaking ever, played out in long, lingering scenes between Sossamon and Runyan. In ROAD TO NOWHERE, the question of who committed the murder (or whether there was a murder at all) slowly drifts away in a Sargasso Sea of false leads, flashbacks and unanswered questions. (Hence the title: the Road leads Nowhere, but that shouldn't stop you from taking the journey.) Hellman uses a similar narrative strategy as in his classic TWO-LANE BLACKTOP where about halfway through the story the actual race stops mattering. If you struggle to make "sense" of the plot, you'll probably miss the point - since one of the major themes that emerges in ROAD TO NOWHERE is the impossibility of ever making sense of anything. Add to this an almost infinite rogue's gallery of characters including veteran actors Cliff De Young and John Diehl, a wry extended cameo from Italian pulp cinema icon Fabio Testi (from Hellman's CHINA 9, LIBERTY 37) - and you have the strangest Hall of Mirrors this side of THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. On the surface, it's the story of a real-life murder-suicide connected to a Southern politician - a mystery which gets inextricably entangled with the making of a film about the tragedy directed by a moody, obsessive filmmaker (Tygh Runyan, who also played the moody, obsessive Stanley Kubrick in Hellman's "Stanley's Girlfriend") and starring a beautiful, opaque actress (Shannyn Sossamon, in easily her strongest and most rewarding performance to date). In fact, his new film is likely his most challenging ever - but that shouldn't put you off. Hellman being who he is, ROAD TO NOWHERE is as dense, poetic and mysterious as anything he's made since probably THE SHOOTING in 1968. So there's great reason to celebrate with the arrival of ROAD TO NOWHERE, his first full feature in over 20 years. Like the masterful Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice (whose classic THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE Hellman gives a nod to in ROAD TO NOWHERE), it's something of a crime that Hellman has directed as few films as he has. Monte Hellman remains one of America's greatest living filmmakers, director of metaphysical classics like TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971), arguably the ultimate American Road Movie, COCKFIGHTER (1974) and a handful of others.
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