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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Uneasy riders
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Uneasy riders

Great biker movies are not only about appearing cool

The ‘Mad Max’ movies are about stunts and black humourPremium
The ‘Mad Max’ movies are about stunts and black humour

In the 1 minute and 34-second teaser of Dhoom:3, the movie that is all set to earn 900 crore and set new benchmarks for Hindi movie business, Aamir Khan slides under a truck on a black BMW bike, looking back to make sure his helmeted head hasn’t touched the vehicle’s tyres.

Dhoom, the movie that kicked off the franchise in 2004, can safely share some of the responsibility for the recent popularity of motorcycles on Indian roads. Dhoom did for bikes what The Fast and The Furious franchise did for cars. It suggested that bikes are sexy, bikers are sexier still (the helmets help), and the vehicles help you cut through traffic. All three factors have played a role in the phenomenon of the mosquito biker, who dances around your car or public transport bus and is gone before you can react.

Great biker movies are not only about appearing cool, although it’s hard not to while perched on a Harley-Davidson or a Hayabusa. In Easy Rider (1969), Peter Fonda’s Wyatt is the last word in biker chic as he glides along on a Harley-Davidson chopper (specially customized for the film) alongside Dennis Hopper’s Billy, whose face is mostly hidden by unruly hair and a bandana.

One of the best reference points for hippie culture, with an array of un-trimmed tresses, chunky jewellery, iconic songs and more joints than in the human body, Easy Rider was a double-engine tribute to the Western genre and the Flower Power generation. The plot, directed in an endearingly shambolic fashion by Hopper, is about two bikers who set out for New Orleans from California with money earned in a drug deal. They take in America’s rugged beauty, hang at a commune, befriend a drunken civil rights lawyer (a marvellous Jack Nicholson) and eventually confront the brutal reality of conservative America.

Easy Rider’s central theme, that there is no better way of learning about the possibilities and limits of the human experience than leaping on to a bike, was echoed several years later by Walter Salles in The Motorcycle Diaries (2004). Based on the memoir by Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Guevara, Salles’s eye-pleasing drama is as meticulously crafted as Easy Rider is messy. The journey undertaken by Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado across South America, which crystallizes Guevara’s political ideas, gives ample room to its photogenic leads (Gael García Bernal as Che, Rodrigo de la Serna as Alberto) and the impossibly lovely locations. The bike breaks down at some point, but the characters forge on towards consciousness and revolution. The recently released Malayalam movie Neelakasham Pachakadal Chuvanna Bhoomi also features two men who ride from Kerala to Nagaland, taking in the beauty and ugliness of India along the way.

Bikes trail fumes and mayhem in Australian director George Miller’s delirious Mad Max (1979) films, set in a futuristic world in which fuel and humanity are in severely short supply. Mel Gibson’s policeman in Mad Max becomes as savage as the amoral bikers whom he is pursuing. In Mad Max 2 (released in the US as The Road Warrior), Gibson’s lonely cowboy protects a holdout fuel station from ultraviolent biker punks. The eerily desolate Australian countryside assumes even more hallucinatory qualities in the sequel, which has none of the niceties of Hollywood cinema. The fuel shortage forces a breakdown of order and sanity in the Mad Max universe, leading to acts of savagery and daredevilry. Social commentary, amazing bikes, mind-boggling stunts and black humour—these two movies bring all the elements together.

The Motorcycle Diaries was made in the same year as Dhoom, but the two movies couldn’t be more different. One uses the bike as a means to self-discovery, while the other deploys the vehicle for crowd-pleasing stunts. The Dhoom franchise has a Bond-like love for action sequences set in exotic locations, but it is cheerfully divorced from the realities of India. Perhaps fantasy is the only way to deal with the deleterious effect of a visit to the petrol pump.

This fortnightly series looks at how the cinema of the past helps us make sense of the present.

Also Read | Nandini’s previous Lounge columns

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Published: 28 Sep 2013, 12:07 AM IST
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