Sunday, August 05, 2018
Karwaan
One For The Road
Karwaan is a lightweight road movie, meant
to be life-altering for the characters, and amusing for the audience, but the
Akarsh Khurana-directed film is neither too funny nor profound enough. It
coasts along on the charm of the actors and breathtaking beauty of the Southern
landscapes not seen too often in Hindi films. Audiences today are pleased with
much less.
Bangalore-based
Avinash (Dulquer Salman--earnest) is a leftover from 3 Idiots—he wanted to be a photographer, is forced by his father
into a secure IT job. The estranged father is killed in a bus accident, and
Avinash want to get the last rites over with quickly, when he discovers, much
to his annoyance, that his father’s coffin has been exchanged with that of the
mother of a Kochi-based woman, whose rebellious daughter Tanya (Mithila Palkar)
joins the trip.
The solemn
Avinash, inexplicably, has a friend in an older garage owner Shaukar (Irrfan),
who offers to transport the coffin in his van part of the way, but the journey
keeps getting extended, and not all diversions are interesting. (Why, for instance, would Avinash not leave a
package to be delivered at the home of the recipient who is not in, and insist
on going out of the way to a wedding, where he is to be found!)
Shaukat is a
man with too many chips on his shoulder—he takes off on foreigners, scantily
clad girls (“my van is not a dance bar”) and people who drink. But he has been given the best lines (some
credit to dialogue writer Hussain Dalal), and even an old-fashioned romance.
Tanya is a bit of a caricature too, millennial girl means she smokes, drinks,
sneaks out of the boys’ hostel, wears tiny shorts and is so spaced out that she
forgets all about her grandmother’s death.
Dulquer
Salmaan gives an effectively unobtrusive performance as opposed to Irrfan’s
show-offy wisecracking. However, the good and bad thing about having Irrfan in
the film is that he gets all the laughs, but when he is not on screen, the
movie seems to deflate.
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