Dunki Movie Review — Sucharita Tyagi
Is it a slapstick comedy? Is it a comedic look at tragic events? Is it a tragedy addressing foreign policies? Is it hard-hitting questions asked comedically?
Dunki, to its detriment, is all the above, and then some.
Hey y’all, my name is Sucharita. Welcome back to my channel where we talk about movies and occasionally with people making them. Today we’re talking about Rajkummar Hirani’s Dunki, now in movie theatres.
Shahrukh Khan is Hardayal Singh Dhillon, fondly called Hardy, an ex-army man. From Pathankot in the year 1995, he goes to Laltu also in Punjab, where he meets 3–4 young Punjabis hellbent on moving to London. In true SRK the savior fashion, he makes it his personal life mission to get them there, obviously falling in love with the pretty lady on the way. Barely anything goes to plan, and now everyone must decide which dream they’d like to keep alive, that of leaving the country or that of being able to enjoy what they’d like to provide for their families, with their families.
The mode of illegal immigration that this Abhijat Joshi, Kanika Dhillon likhit film is inspired by is the soul-crushing “Dunki route”, journeys people from our side of the world undertake to get to US, Canada, England type western lands, jinke work and resident visas are near impossible to come by for regular folk. Jungle, nadiyan, registan paar karke, log kisi tarah pohonchte hain, if they survive the journey, then they figure out how to live in the shadows, make no noise, and find gainful employment at the same time. Imagine the sacrifices this must take, for people to WILLINGLY leave a country that is NOT stricken by war or famine, leave a country where even during peacetime, some individuals have lost hope to the extent of risking their very lives to get out.
Alas, Dunki’s empathy towards its own subjects isn’t deep enough to explore what really IS at stake for them. Vikram Kochhar is lovely as Buggu, a simpleton who wants to leave because his father is unemployed and his mother has to go to work wearing pants. She doesn’t seem to care or mind, but he hates the way men look at her. Anil Grover as Balli wants to leave for his mother who works too hard at her tailoring business and Taapsee Pannu as Manu Randhawa ALSO wants to leave because her family isn’t doing well financially. Why these folks won’t find better employment in Punjab, or the rest of the country, isn’t explored. What are the systems keeping them away from achieving their earning potential in India? Logically, then one is to assume their motivations are rooted in their lack of understanding of what the journey is going to take, unaware if there even IS a pot of gold at the end of the promised rainbow.
The writing doesn’t seem sure of how it feels about these 3 and their decision to leave. And if that is primarily to be left up to the viewer to deduce, then Dunki perhaps needed to be a deeper character study. We need to know MORE about what moves Manu. Taapsee Pannu plays the “fiery”, “feisty” woman who refuses to take crap from men, well enough to a fault. But then in the first entire hour of the film, she is once again relegated to playing the fiery feisty woman who refuses to take crap. Like the current era, Samuel L Jackson repeats a version of Nick Fury in each subsequent film. Excellent at the drill, but underused as a performer.
The first hour of Dunki looks tragically, astonishingly callous when you hold it against the rest of the film. The first few sequences generate fun intrigue — why is Taapsee at a hospital? Who is Hardy and why do they desperately want to go back to him? Why is the travel agent telling these people they can’t get Indian VISAs when they’re Indian? You want to know. Loud jaunty music underscores these goofball antics which then shift to Punjab in a flashback — the comedy though stretches for far too long. An inexplicable 4th wall breaking voice-over starts dumping exposition in each sequence, characters are introduced and then maintained as “types”. The Punjabi are punajbing, Shahrukh Khan says “Oh ji papa ji”, and “Mera plan toh sun lo”, constantly dialed to 11, his acting choice hinging on little more than the Punjabi bade loud hote hain stereotype. Manu is besties with one guy who works as a barber, and the other sells salwars to ladies, never explaining why in a 90s Punjab small town she is never seen with women. As long as the plot progresses, details don’t matter. Essentially everything, up until the interval, has kind of a fake plasticky sheen one sees in those lyra lyra anytime anywhere advertising.
Vicky Kaushal as Sukhi, is the one character with a sort of deliberately written humanity. Even in the funny bits, a particularly effective one where he reads off a monologue about the unfairness of the English language exam IELTS, Sukhi’s whole being is laden with sadness. You find out in another affecting scene why. When Sukhi is drunkenly reminiscing about his lost love, a deep melancholy overtakes him, and because Vicky is a magnificent performer, we are engulfed in it too. Thankfully for puncturing the heaviness, the next bit of comedy doesn’t come from Sukhi suddenly breaking character, its Hardy who wakes a man up in the middle of the night to yell at him on Sukhi’s behalf only to find out he’s woken the wrong man up.
Shahrukh Khan as Hardy is a wild card the film uses at any point, for anything. Conveniently he has no one alive in his family so whatever you know is what everyone else does too, except that it’s never a lot more than what you know Shahrukh Khan characters to usually, always be. He WILL come in and assume the role of team leader, solve problems or die trying, everyone WILL fall in love with his charming ways, and there WILL be romance. Even when you see him play an older version of himself, Jawan ka Captain Rathore comes to mind.
The first mention of what the Dunki route is, the real external journey, arrives close to the interval point by which time the cliches have allowed you to predict every subsequent scene without trying too hard. Mild spoiler in the next para, go ahead and mute I’ll give you a thumbs up when to unmute. Ready? Go. In a comedic sequence, as Punjabi people get together to learn English from Boman Irani who again is doing the English teacher caricature Bollywood likes to present, an overweight young man needs to go to the bathroom. The teacher doesn’t let him leave because he can’t ask for permission in proper English, this leads to, what the screenplay pointedly tells us is a funny little ditty about wanting to go the lavatory. Before the sequence is over the man has relieved himself in the classroom causing everyone to go chhhhheeeeeee. Leave aside the fatphobia, this man’s fate quickly becomes grim as he is straight-up shot through the head in a later sequence, and in an EVEN later one, one of the immigrants illegally assumes his identity to be able to travel back to India without getting caught, with zero acknowledgement of any empathy towards their friend the identity belonged to.
Thumbs up
My biggest concern watching Dunki was the near-constant tonal whiplash caused due to the film’s inability to pick a lane. Immigrants hunted like the game in a desert on foreign land is followed by a scene detailing a sexual assault about to occur, then friends set fire to their friend’s bodies, which IMMEDIATELY cuts to a scene with Shahrukh bringing the romance, on top of a train as one does. Arijit Singh sings Oh Mahi Oh Mahi as your heartbeat jumps erratically, your brain unable to direct it. To make matters worse the immediate next sequence has everyone shut in a giant container with other illegal immigrants as you get an unsightly close-up of a man’s behind who has just taken a dump in a makeshift toilet within said container. Raudra, Karuna, Shringar, Vibhatas, sab coming pell-mell at you indiscriminately. Things get TOO real right after they get TOO filmy, going back and forth, disallowing you to appropriately dwell in any single moment.
As the film ends, Hirani makes the choice to show his viewers images of actual people undertaking the Dunki journey at extreme personal cost, some alive some barely hanging on. Like at the end of BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee delivers a punch to the gut with real visuals from the Charlottesville car attack where a white supremacist ran over protestors. That coda exists only to remind you what you’re watching in the name of entertainment always has real-world inspiration. The lives of people that movie stars are co-opting to earn big money and awards are not to be forgotten amid the comedic narrative. In that coda reality instantly supersedes fiction, the power of cinematic storytelling displayed in a way most artistic.
In Dunki, Hirani’s visuals give way to ONE more joke about a dhobi pachhad. If that isn’t callous, I don’t know what is. The movie is most certainly playing in a theatre near you.
