Review: Akarsh Khurana’s “Karwaan” is a frustratingly bland fare.

[May contain spoilers, many of them.]

It’s not particularly difficult to identify what kind of film Akarsh Khurana’s Karwaan is trying to be. The effort is practically visible. Its characters wear sunglasses picked off a shelf from a designer store. Their clothes are dapper, summery. They travel in a beautiful blue van through some gorgeous, sun-drenched ghats. And their wonderfully trimmed faces (with a touch of make-up) do not show any signs of fatigue or age. Charming. We get a few lines that ruminate over presumably meaningful stuff, like death, life and grief, many of them over a drink of coconut water overlooking streams impossibly blue and lush green trees. We are supposed to swoon, catch these bits of wisdom before they flit through the air and disappear. But the only problem is, we don’t.

Karwaan is a film that proves, among other things, a useful fact: That good-looking films don’t always end up being good cinema. A relationship with a film cannot be built if one doesn't understand from where it originated, why this story needed to be told. Really, there is absolutely no excuse for writing a character who goes on unfounded rants in Hindi whenever he bumps into foreigners, or a coy guy who takes orders (or ‘requests’, if you may, although they don’t sound so) on the phone from a sobbing woman he’s never met. If these are attempts to make us like these two, then one should get the idea that the makers are trying hard to find a footing without straining their imagination too much. And how marvellous to be proved right. For the most part, this film seems to meander through sequences where the characters do things that, I would like to believe, are essential for us to understand them. Only this doesn't happen. These bits seem jarring, alienating us from them. Who are these people? Where do they fit into this world? Why are we supposed to sympathise with them? We don't know. But the film rolls on assuming we do, and so do we.

It's not as if the makers don't try to get us to like them. As if this were a cleverer idea than writing a coherent story, the makers toss in a few painful moments (some unexpectedly hitting their mark) where humour is forced into the story to give it some more juice to keep us invested. These attempts feature a fast-talking character at his brusquest, inviting bewildered looks from the people he comes in contact with. When he’s not jovially expressing his disgust at women wearing ‘skimpy’ clothes (which he does on at least two occasions), he pretends to be mute just so he wouldn’t have to pay for petrol. (Incredible how this callous little detail is played for laughs.)

For all that goes wrong with the film, one thing is for certain: Karwaan’s premise is undoubtedly more interesting than most Hindi films’. Two dead bodies get mixed up, and a software engineer from Bangalore has to travel to Kochi to drop off the ‘wrong’ dead body and pick up his father’s, the ‘right’ one. It could have made a splendid black comedy, but the makers settle for a road film instead. Given that the pleasures of a road film can equal a black comedy’s if done right, this doesn’t seem to be a poor decision at the outset. However, when the characters come into the picture, things do start to look shaky. For one, it often feels as if three different characters written for three different films were plucked out and placed in one, and a blue van was thrown into the mix as an afterthought so that they could be together. These characters have – unsurprisingly – gloomy pasts, and this quirky road trip will – again unsurprisingly – prove to be more eventful and life-changing than they originally thought, wringing their pasts out slowly and allowing them a chance to make peace with them.

If only we were living in the early 2000’s and all of this sounded new. We are, unfortunately, eighteen years into the 21st century. But, this doesn’t deter the makers from approaching it like a brand-new concept, putting together something around the ‘comic’ sequences and ironing it with monologues about life and death to ensure all the elements stay in their place. Half-baked developments are introduced without a good reason. A romantic angle for one character (handled a little insensitively later on) and an encounter with a past flame for another is hardly relevant to the story, which I thought began with a guy trying to arrange for a proper burial for his deceased father from whom he was estranged, but ironically enough these parts are among the film’s most engaging. I am not completely sure the writers intended for it to be so, but much like in life, unpredictability has its own rewards.

What saves the film from being a completely bland fare is the considerable charm of its three leads. (Although it’s been a while since a film has forced Irrfan Khan to ham.) Till the end, Karwaan maintains its distance, its few rewards limited to the surface. I walked away without feeling a thing for any of its characters. That disappointing feeling, I believe, can be cured by a drink of cool coconut water. 

[Not For Reproduction]

Review : Navdeep Singh's "NH10" is frighteningly familiar.

Some years ago, I watched a small marvel that drew heavily yet dutifully from Roman Polanski's 1974 masterpiece, Chinatown. The film in question had captured the tenor of rural India so accurately, I could almost feel the graininess of the barren highways and dusty terrains. Navdeep Singh's impressively constructed Manorama: Six Feet Under was remade with faithful reverence and slid into an Indian setting so neatly, I soon forgot that the original story had a distinctly American flavor to it. 

NH10, his second feature that borrows this time from the terrifying and stunning 2008 British thriller that made sure I did not venture outside for a while, Eden Lake, is set in a starker environment that lacks the inspired lethargy of his debut's, but it gets the moody, vicious aura of the country's northern badlands on the mark. It's a tragedy, the scariest to come trudging along in a while, told with dogged brutishness and directness of manner, and that perhaps is what sets it apart from other Hindi films tackling a similar theme. There's no pontificating, no pomposity, which is surprising enough for a Hindi film that adopts a condemnatory approach to the atrocious problems that rural India has got itself entangled in. 

A trick that filmmakers often resort to to amplify the horror of two upright protagonists trying to cope with something unpleasant and unfamiliar to them is to show them leading a seemingly perfect, content life before deliberately plunging them in the bowels of brutality. It is a crafty ploy that never fails, and it is used to great effect in NH10. It cuts a disturbingly clear line between what is acceptable in the urban and rural parts of the country and how the law is reshaped in the two, which explains why an urbane couple from Gurgaon--the protagonists of this joyride--embrace their haplessness with wide-eyed alarm. For someone used to being cushioned by a law that works, the horrors of NH10 come across as ghastly - and utterly believable. 

After the story switches gears and inevitably transfigures into a functioning chase film, Singh controls the growing suspense with considerable deftness. Most of the action happens in the desolate stretches of arid land next to the highway against the black skies, an added bonus for a chase film, and with only a handful of characters. It's deeply satisfying to be a part of a no-frills, uncomplicated narrative that only wishes to toy with suspense, violence, fear and long, anxious silences, and Singh leisurely milks every moment to make it worth your time. For the most part, this goes down rather well, with the actors bringing a sense of credibility complete with the dialect of the region to their vaguely-sketched characters, until too many coincidences render the narrative strained and fabricated instead of organic. 

And it's such a damper. For a bracing final showdown, Singh and his writer Sudip Sharma inundate the story with absurd twists that intend to give a quick glimpse into the minds of those who perpetrate honor killings or defend them, but it doesn't add any juice to either the plot or the characters. The final fifteen minutes make a strong case for feminism, and the grim, undeniable pleasure one feels to watch these sexist men, who habitually refer to women a Hindi slang term for "whore," getting violently harassed one by one by a resolute woman with a crushed conscience is overwhelming and, in a mad way, comforting. (The guy sitting next to me loudly called for the act of revenge to be grislier and cheered when the plucky female protagonist went for these men on her own, and I did not shush him.) 

However, that does not make up for its failings. The film never pays a nod to its original. The twists are feeble in their impact, and the characters often do things only characters in a movie would think of doing. If only the film would have been more naturalistic and the late twists would have been discarded entirely, it would have been a more accessible, more urgent film. If only. 

The worst thing a thriller can be is predictable, and NH10 unfortunately is an addition to that category. But, the best thing a predictable thriller can be is satisfying. And the macabre NH10, with its socially aware zeal and determination to unmask the perpetual feeling of dread our women have to walk around with everyday, falls into that category, too.

Review : Pawel Pawlikowski's "Ida" is melancholic and unforgettable.

Pawel Pawlikowski's Ida is a film of mystique; there's nothing exotic about it, but its potency is astonishing. Often, in film, we've been on numerous trips with a character who has lived a fabricated life and who naively digs into their past in search of the truth, and the bleak surprises await them. How good this kind of film eventually turns out to be hinges on how startling the revelations are, and how profoundly we let them hassle us. 

In Ida's case, the revelations are more dramatic than disquieting, but the sheer fluidity of its storytelling makes it an indelible experience. 

In spirit, it channels Denis Villeneuve's stunning debut Incendies, a singularly harrowing tale about a pair of twins who unmask their dead mother's cryptic past, but the comparison stops there. Pawlikowski's handling of the material is much more understated in stark contrast to Villeneuve's brutally frank modus operandi. There is no shock value, there are no loose threads. He sticks to narrating the story with as little pontificating as possible, without digressing and without emphasizing much on the disclosures. It's the characters he aims to create. And with characters so humongously, delicately multi-layered, how can one not be intrigued? On a road-trip with these two baffling female protagonists, we virtually decipher the unspoken subtleties of the human mind, and how it reacts to certain muted afflictions.

Ida is a bare film; scarce characters govern its plot, the exchanges between them are terse and the wintery landscape of Poland the film is set against makes it look dismally frigid and cramped. It's a film shot in gorgeously gloomy black-and-white, a chic touch, and scored unassumingly that complements its appearance. The imagery is aesthetic, of course; it chronicles a distinct story of its own, of post-war Poland and of nostalgia-swamped glimpses into a world we have only read about, a resourceful supplement in a film where dialogue is kept to a minimum to amplify the obscurity of its characters. And the performances (Agata Kulesza, in particular, is fabulous) are exacting and poignant. 

In the end, when the stirring revelations are done and dusted with, Pawlikowski takes Ida a step further. He proceeds to scrutinize how it has swayed his characters, exploring their state of mind with dedication and deliberation that puts Ida in the league of the best films of the year. The final half-hour is an act of reaffirming why it is a film that stands out in a stream of other films alike. Can a weak rebellion against a life of illusion diminish the harsher versions of the truth? Pawlikowski unrelentingly asks this question several times in his perusal of his lead character, but it echoes loudest in the film's dying minutes.

Ida is an expressionistic gem of a film about self-identity and forlornness that warrants lengthy reflection.