‘Karwaan’…What was promised as a fun trip, turns out to be a slow and lengthy drive.

If you watch Karwaan’s trailer, you are promised a fun road trip movie filled with scenic views, bouts of humour and an underlying current of emotions but sadly what we get instead a very very lengthy and mediocre tale of 3 oddballs on a trip.

The plot is nothing out of the ordinary; Avinash (played by an understated Dulquer Salman), loves photography but is stuck in a dead-end I.T. job in Bangalore, (he is maybe what would have happened to Farhan from 3 Idiots, if he didn’t quit engineering.) We watch him haul every day in his dull, soul-crushing routine in a similar fashion to Ranbir Kapoor’s character from Tamasha, and incidentally, both these characters don’t see eye to eye with their fathers.
Out of the blue, Avinash receives a phone call one day, with a woman stating in a rather matter-of-fact tone that his father has passed away in a bus accident on the way to a pilgrimage site. The problem is that his father’s dead body is switched up with another stranger, and after a rather overlong series of questioning and phone calls, Avinash sets off to Kochi, with his friend Shaukat (Irrfan Khan in top form) and Tanya (a spunky Mithila Palkar).

The cinematography by Avinash Arun is top notch, especially the wide shots that are so picture perfect, but with no real emotion behind them, they ended up looking like postcards. When Avinash is describing his love for photography to Tanya, he states that photography is about capturing a moment not creating one; the same explanation seems to apply for the movie as well. The red-lit balcony of the hotel, the blue tones of the hospital interiors, the naturally lit dawn is all individually perfect, but with no soul behind them, they don’t strike a chord. They just end up as a collection of moments, rather than a cumulative experience.

What is truly disheartening about Karwaan was that, with such an exciting star cast, and offbeat music score, the movie leaves you feeling empty. The film making seems like an attempt to showcase a slow meditative piece as well as a quirky black comedy, but with bland characters, Karwaan fails.

Irrfan Khan’s Shaukat is the only reason to stay till the end, and I don’t know whose idea was it to put Dulquer Salman in Kerela and not make his character speak Malayalam. I was literally waiting for him to blurt some out at some point.