With the Cannes Festival last week, we had to talk about cinema!

And we simply could not miss one of the films included in the official selection: On the Road, a Walter Salles adaptation of the famous novel by Jack Kerouac. And it just so happens that On the Road is the theme of our current collection!

The director worked on this film for over 9 years, unable to find anyone brave enough to produce it. But now at last, the movie has hit the screens. This is a superb piece of work carried by hugely talented actors and breathtaking scenery. It offers an unflinching depiction of the birth of the beat generation, who preferred to hit the road and revel in drugs, alcohol and women, rather than settle to be a part of a standardized society, confined by the straightjacket of late 40s McCarthyism.



It all starts in New York when a chance encounter brings together Sal Paradise (played by the wonderful Sam Riley), who has just lost his father, his friend Carlo Marx and the fascinating Dean Moriarty (played by an on-form Garett Hedlund), who has just come out of jail and is married to 16-year-old Marylou (played by the excellent Kristen Stewart), who is as seductive as she is lost. They go out, get inebriated on whisky and jazz, and show each other love and admiration through their conversations on poetry and literature. Marco the poet and Dean, with Marylou still by his side, head for Denver, leaving Sal behind to write a novel that is going nowhere. But the young writer cannot help but hear the call of the road, which resonates louder and louder. He hitchhikes for days to join his friends, to experience new adventures that will disconnect him from the world, to feel free and alive, taking notes all the while. With Marylou, they travel eastwards, always eastwards, on the roads of America, nourished by the taste of freedom that flows through the open windows of their car.

The film stays true to this theme throughout, like a never-ending strip of asphalt urging the characters onwards. We bear witness to their hunger for life, to Dean’s chaotic romantic adventures, which see him take on the role of both father figure (to Camille, brilliantly played by Kirsten Dunst) and executioner, and to Sal’s ever growing writing talent. The journey is not in vain, as it gives rise to the most iconic book of its generation, which leaves its mark on the collective unconscious even decades later. This is story for those to whom freedom and a lust for life are everything.