When one thinks of a road movie, the images that instantly spring to mind are of endless journeys along long, dusty American highways, man and motor fused together amidst desolate, inhospitable surrounds, of Two Lane Blacktop (1971), Easy Rider (1969) or Vanishing Point (1971). What does not think of is the quiet, two-hour drive west from London to Bristol, but that is exactly what Radio On, the 1979 debut feature by film critic Christopher Petit, offers up instead. A reinvention of the road movie genre for England, it is a film with few precedents and no antecedents, but remains a fascinating portrait of a very particular place and time.
The story, for what it's worth, concerns the Kafka-esque monickered Robert B, a late-night London DJ who receives news of his brother's death in Bristol, and ostensibly sets out on a road trip to investigate the circumstances. Along the way, he stops off at a pub, picks up a hitchhiker, meets a man living in a caravan, eventually alighting in Bristol where he encounters and befriends a German lady estranged from her daughter. But what becomes evident early on from the almost entire absence of narrative thrust is that this is not a film about mystery or plot, but a mood piece, a piece of British arthouse cinema not ashamed to wear its European influences on its sleeve.
The most obvious debt, as is clear from as early on as the opening credits, is to Wim Wenders, associate producer of the movie, as well as its clear spiritual forefather. His German road movie trilogy, Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976) is the obvious stylistic influence here, in particular the monochrome photography (Wenders loaned his own DP Robby Müller to Petit for the making of the film), but also the use of long shot lengths, allowing the camera to linger on scenes much longer than would be conventional, giving a feeling of melancholy reflection.
For a road movie, there is a remarkable lack of a sense of liberty — driving scenes are mostly confined to shots filmed from inside the vehicle, and the framing of the windscreen gives less of the impression of the freedom of the open road a la Easy Rider, but at times more like the trapped Marcello Mastroianni attempting to escape at the start of 8½ (1963). In this sense it is different from the Wenders films, and perhaps more reflecting the size of the British Isles — no road journey in one direction can last much longer than a few hours by definition, so how much a sense of freedom can there be?
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