‘Karwaan’ Has All the Right Ingredients, But Is Still Bland

‘Karwaan’ tries hard to be a breezy, slice-of-life film, but fails miserably. 

(Photo: Erum Gour/ The Quint)

Camera: Shiv Kumar Maurya
Editor: Kunal Mehra
Video Producer: Chandni Sharma

‘Karwaan’ has a lot of good things going for it . For starters, there is Irrfan Khan – the inimitable style with which he breathes life into a scene by simply being present in the frame. Then there is Dulquer Salmaan who makes his Bollywood debut; he sets our hearts aflutter every time he comes on screen.

Mithila Palkar is beautiful, a burst of energy and always a delight to watch. Then there is the breathtaking cinematography by Avinash Arun that paints the movie with lush green and radiant blue hues.

Despite all these elements, so essential for a great cinematic experience being present, ‘Karwaan’ is devoid of soul. They simply never come together as a whole.

Avinash (Dulquer Salmaan) is an unhappy man stuck in a job he hates. Flashbacks reveal it was his father who crushed his dream of becoming a photographer.

Cut to the present, when he finds out that his father has died in an accident but the body he receives is of another lady who died in the same bus mishap.

Avinash‘s friend Shaukat (Irrfan) offers to take him to Kochi to get the bodies exchanged. Some absurd and tragic circumstances lead to Avinash meeting a young college-going girl Tanya (Mithila Palkar).

‘Karwaan’ tries hard to be a breezy, slice-of-life film, but fails miserably, thanks to the wafer-thin plot.

Forgettable songs and half-baked characters leave us strangely detached from the on-screen proceedings. It paints a vibrant picture visually, no doubt, but is frustratingly vacuous.

A film that remains loyal to the idea of the journey being as important as the destination. We also get glimpses of their inner journey that the characters themselves undergo.

Avinash is the most quiet of the lot. The tension that rests on his knit brows seem to be the result of his long dysfunctional relationship with his dad. Shaukat reveals the ordeal he went through at the hands of the man he says could never be much of a dad to him. At one point Tanya speaks of the “daddy issues” that all three of them have in common. It gives us some insight into the inner motivations of the characters but we keep meddling only on the surface.

There are multiple stops on the way. A wedding is gate-crashed. Then an elaborate sequence where an injured Shaukat is besotted with a woman he meets in the hospital. These are supposed to elicit laughter, even the scenes where Shaukat expresses his shock at Tanya’s dressing sense but only end up increasing the randomness .

The unhurried pace too seems a little too indulgent for comfort.

The cinematography or Irrfan’s irreverence might work individually but as a composite whole we leave the theatre with a strange detachment with the characters we spent so long trying to figure out. The beauty can definitely have a hypnotic effect but the film never really takes off.

2 Quints out of 5!