When Kiran Met Karen

My overwhelming feeling and singular thought watching When Kiran Met Karen was simply, “oh no.” This movie is not good! It’s the kind of not good where I spent more time listing things I liked than things that were bad. This is partially because the list of good things is much shorter and also because I want to be a nice person. Passion went into this project. I genuinely want all WLW movies to be good. When Kiran Met Karen can’t be called good though.

The film’s lead character, Kiran is a popular Bollywood star. Currently in America, she is staying with her boyfriend, Dev. Dev and Kiran’s relationship is complicated. The short form is he wants a lot more from her than she is willing to give. Kiran is the subject of a scandal back in India and receives a lot of bad press. To try and counter this, she arranges an interview with a journalist from a magazine with a slant towards celebrating accomplished women. Kiran and Karen spend an evening together. They do substances, share secrets and eventually have sex. But it turns out, Karen hasn’t been at all truthful with her identity or motives.

I expected the major focus of the film to be the romance. It’s not. It’s more a character exploration of Kiran that goes off the rails at the last minute. The film devotes more time to Kiran and Dev’s relationship. The twist is that Dev hired Karen to get blackmail on Kiran via a lesbian kiss. I’ll give the movie points. I didn’t expect this because I didn’t expect the movie to have a twist. Upon admitting this, Kiran throws Karen out. Though they end the movie back together. This is pretty insane. Kiran has a lot of character flaws and Karen is a complete unknown because she lied about her whole identity. They knew each other less than 24 hours! This is not a romance I root for because it’s not even a romance. You’ve fucked up really bad when I’m annoyed that two women ended the movie together.

The most obvious of When Kiran Met Karen’s problems is the overwhelming lack of budget. We’re talking handheld camera, minimal lighting, bad sound recording and few locations. The film’s ambition far outstrips the budget they have. Kiran is a huge Bollywood star. They absolutely can’t afford to show that. For such a big star, it’s weird that she’d do a press conference to 14 people in a three-star hotel. Outside of any story considerations, this is a bad film to look at and especially to listen to.

Taking story into consideration, it is extremely bad. The plot is unfocused and the characters are generic. Kiran has a lot of demons as a character. Primarily, she’s a drug addict and you can be sure this movie doesn’t have enough sensitivity, talent or time to deal with that well. In general, the dialogue lacks any depth or poetry. The film utilizes a lot of flashbacks but the “present” setting takes place over a few days. This comes together to make the film feel simultaneously rushed but slow.

The film uses a lot of bad, generic and dated music choices that also tend to bring the plot to a halt. As soon as a song that sounds similar to a popular song you’ve heard starts playing, it’s a sure sign that the film will spend several minutes expressing a simple concept. The best one of these is after Kiran and Dev’s relationship ends, Dev gets a sad boy montage. This consists of him looking at pictures of her, breaking the picture against a wall, stepping on the picture and burning yet other pictures. I wonder if the film is trying to tell me he’s upset about their breakup?

Damn, When Kiran Met Karen is not good. Still, I want to celebrate direction Manan Katohora. He put a lot of passion and work into this project. He served many different roles in the crew and managed to produce a film despite lots of limitations, primarily financial. This sort of can-do attitude should be celebrated and admired. The amount of creative problem solving that went into releasing the finished product must have been insane. I’ve good mad respect for the hustle and the confidence needed to make a low budget film like this. I can respect it in the abstract. But in reality, the finished product is pretty far from good.

Overall rating: 1.8/10

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