REVIEW 789: DUNKI

Release date:	December 21, 2023
Director:	Rajkumar Hirani
Cast:	Shah Rukh Khan, Taapsee Pannu, Boman Irani, Anil Grover, Vikram Kocchar, Cameo: Vicky Kaushal
Language:	Hindi

 

There’s always a first time for everything. Your first love. Your first kiss. Your first paycheck. Even your first boring film. 

 

Now there’s a word I never expected to use for a Rajkumar Hirani venture. Yet “boring” is the aptest adjective for the director’s latest film Dunki that he has also co-written with Abhijat Joshi and Kanika Dhillon. Whatever criticism Hirani’s previous works may have deserved (3 Idiots featured that balaatkaar ‘joke’, it starred a 44-year-old as a teen, it favoured broad brush strokes over nuance as did PK, and Sanju was PR for Sanjay Dutt) none of them could be accused of dullness. Much about 3 Idiots was fun. PK was entertaining and brave. Ranbir Kapoor aced Sanju. Above all these, is the joyous Munnabhai series. Dunki feels like it was made by someone else. 

 

Taapsee Pannu here plays Manu Randhawa who wants to prove to her Dad that she’s as capable as a son of clearing the family’s debts and reclaiming the large house they lost. Buggu Lakhanpal (Vikram Kocchar) wants his Mum to quit the job she took after his Dad retired, because men leer at her when she wears pants as part of her work uniform. Balli Kakkad (Anil Grover) wants to release his Mum from toiling as a tailor, but sees no future in the barber shop where he’s employed. In this village where the West is viewed as El Dorado, and migration the fix for all problems, they begin single-mindedly chasing their goal of leaving India. 

 

One of them makes it to London. With no legal route in sight, the others risk death to swim, walk and stow away in vehicles, covering thousands of miles across Asia and Europe to get to their Promised Land. They do this without any idea how they will earn money abroad. They are guided on this perilous odyssey by Hardy a.k.a. Hardayal Singh Dhillon (Shah Rukh Khan). Their story dating back to 1995 is recounted in a flashback 25 years later. 

The film’s title is Punjabi for what are known as “donkey flight” methods used by Indians to gain illegal entry into rich Western countries. It’s a well-established term you will find in press reports, because Manus, Buggus and Ballis exist in large numbers. Just last year, for instance, the media covered the tragic tale of Vaishaliben and Jagdish Patel, a married couple in their 30s from Gujarat, who froze to death with their 11-year-old daughter and three-year-old son in a field near Canada’s border with the US. They were in Canada on visitor’s visas, and died while trying to illegally enter the US on foot. The Patels were not impoverished, not from a beleaguered caste or religious minority, not activists or any category of folks victimised by their government. An excellent BBC profile explained that they were in fact a middle-class couple who probably fell for ‘the American dream’ peddled by human traffickers, had most likely not researched the plight of illegal migrants to the US, but succumbed to a bizarre social pressure to migrate that pervades their Gujarat village. 

 

It would take thoughtful scripting to make a candid yet compassionate film on those like the Patels whose unthinking quest ends in tragedy. The obliviousness to reality of aspiring immigrants from Punjab was captured with a blend of empathy and exasperation in the Canadian Indian director Deepa Mehta’s Heaven On Earth (English-Punjabi-Hindi, 2008). Preity Zinta was remarkable in that film as a woman who leaves the middle-class comfort of her home for what her community deems a prized catch, an NRI groom, only to find that he had hidden the truth that he was struggling for survival in Canada. Heaven On Earth’s heroine was certainly financially better off in Punjab than Manu, Buggu and Balli, but the point is, all four were socially conditioned or pressured not to look before leaping, to emigrate without planning for what lay on the other side of that journey. Unlike Mehta’s film, Dunki does not scrutinise this desperation but romanticises it. 

 

So, worse than Dunki’s tedium is its political immaturity. The script avoids any tricky ground that would require intricate characterisation. It does not examine why the trio did not pursue options in India with the doggedness that they invested in putting their lives on the line to reach the UK. It does not train a critical lens on the patriarchy that drove Buggu and Balli to prefer possible death over earning mothers, nor have the finesse to envisage a situation where a man may understandably worry about a mother he loves, yet not see nearly killing himself as the only alternative. 

 

One character says sorrowfully that strugglers like them are driven to do work in the UK that locals do not want to, like mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. These are tasks that Dalits in India undertake (and are often forced to stick with) because upper castes are contemptuous of such jobs, although the latter are known to take them up when in dire straits abroad. Dunki does not stop to look at whether Manu, Buggu and Balli would have been willing to clean floors and toilets in India, and what the answer to that question says about them and the society they come from. 

 

To effectively address such complex points and still elicit warmth towards the three would have been a challenge, therefore Dunki steers clear of these issues completely. 

 

The film does not even do enough to generate that warmth organically. Maudlin music is played loudly to manipulate the audience into weeping, since the writing lacks flesh and insight. 

 

Dunki’s tone deafness to casteism extends to race too. One ‘joke’ involves the trio’s confusion and stress on sighting a black man when they reach what they think is the UK. They are relieved when they spot a white couple immediately after. Cringe. 

 

Dunki’s arguments favouring illegal immigrants are half-baked, and its poorly reasoned comments on British imperialists unwittingly suggest an equivalence between colonialism and migration. 

 

It is not clear whether subconscious prejudice or a conscious desire to pander to the dominant national mood is at the heart of certain script elements, or these were just instances of mindless writing. Such as the fact that the violence and sadism that Hardy, Manu and Buggu encounter while crossing borders comes from men in Muslim-majority countries. Or that the only kindness they face in this arduous process comes from a white male judge at their court hearing in the UK. 

 

(Spoiler alert) Hardy and his companions are told by the judge that they can get asylum in the UK if they claim they faced persecution in India. He refuses, the rest give in. Was this meant to be a meta moment blurring the line between SRK’s character and SRK himself, as Pathan and Jawan repeatedly did? If so, the writers might consider the meaning that scene takes on in a real-world context in which Muslims in particular and minorities at large are expected to prove their loyalty to India while members of the majority community are not. (Spoiler alert ends)

 

Like all Hindi films aspiring to be mainstream, a romance between the biggest male and female star in the cast is rammed into the script, which brings up the point that the actors playing SRK’s wives and girlfriends are getting younger with each film. Pannu at 36 looks like she might be the nearly 60-year-old Khan’s daughter in reality, and no, saying so does not make this an ageist review – this is a criticism of the ageism that producers, directors and male stars direct at women actors in their 50s who they do not consider attractive enough for a man in his 50s. C’mon SRK, you position yourself as being better than this, so why don’t you do better by women artistes?

 

The sexual chemistry between Khan and Pannu is zilch, which makes the blaring song “Ho aisa waisa ishq nahin, yeh ishq hai Raanjhe waala” sound ridiculous in a painfully unconvincing romantic scene. The fault lies not with the song, but with the scenario. 

 

Frankly, the chemistry between all the characters in Dunki is down to zero. 

 

Still, Pannu gets the space she deserves, which is unusual for a male-superstar-led Indian film (case in point: the short shrift given to Nayanthara in Jawan). She and Grover are good. So is Vicky Kaushal in a cameo. Kocchar and Boman Irani (who plays the English coach Geetu Gulati) can be excused for hamming in their intentionally OTT comedy scenes, but Khan cannot be given such leeway. His over-acting is especially jarring in intense exchanges, and is shown up by successive scenes in which he and Pannu are emotional, she with restraint, he with face all a-quiver. 

 

Pannu is even given weirdly drastic ageing makeup, causing her to advance what looks like 50 years in 25, no doubt to match Manu with Hardy in the present day. Seriously? 

 

Someone please revive the more controlled SRK of Swades, Chak De! India and Fan, or the star who was comfortable enough with his age to make it look sexy in Dear Zindagi. 

 

Dunki’s only truly sharp passage comes early on, cocking a snook at Far Right nationalists’ obsessive reverence for Jana Gana Mana. There’s also fun to be had with Balli’s barbering, Geetu’s classes and the students’ jugaadu solution to their English problem. The latter is hilarious, actually. But there is only so far that these scattered rays of sunshine can take the film. 

 

For a truly intelligent recent account of an Indian illegal immigrant in the US, try catching Danish Renzu’s heart-wrenching The Illegal (English, 2021) starring Suraj Sharma.  

 

Dunki is an over-wrought, over-stretched, over-crowded sample of cinematic mediocrity, marked by clunky writing and puerile politics – an inexplicably incompetent film coming from one of the most successful teams in Hindi film history.

 

Rating (out of 5 stars): 1.75   

 

Running time:

161 minutes

 

Poster courtesy: IMDB 

REVIEW 741: DRIVE

Release date:	November 1, 2019
Director:	Tarun Mansukhani
Cast: Language:	Sushant Singh Rajput, Jacqueline Fernandez, Boman Irani, Pankaj Tripathi, Vibha Chibber, Sapna Pabbi, Vikramjeet Virk Hindi

So it is here at last: the first direct-to-Netflix release by Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions. 

Produced by KJo, written and directed by Tarun “Dostana” Mansukhani, starring Sushant Singh Rajput and Jacqueline Fernandez, Drive is a thriller that follows the tried-and-tested pattern of a heist within a heist within a heist. Film industries across the world have explored this genre to fun effect. India’s Hindi film industry a.k.a. Bollywood proved that it has the chops for wheels-within-wheels-within-wheels crime back in 1978 with the iconic Don starring Amitabh Bachchan, more recently with Abbas Mustan’s Race in 2008 and the SRK-Farhan Akhtar Don films in 2006 and 2011.

The very least you would expect after seeing the poster, the credits of Drive and reading its summary is that it would deliver spadefuls of excitement, pretty people in pretty clothes and swish special effects. Well, lower those expectations right away. 

Sure, Rajput and Fernandez look hot in the film, both have tremendously fit bodies, and if you think back on the story, the original concept probably had the potential to become a slick cops-and-robbers drama. At first it does seem like Drive might prove to be an entertainer but the narrative, like the special effects, steadily declines as the film progresses. The SFX are overall so downmarket that it is hard to believe Drive comes to us from Dharma, whose signature for at least two decades has been glossy visuals. 

Not that anything else in the film is of high calibre. Well suited to the SFX are the generic storytelling style, the overall ordinary production quality, inconsistent audio, a stand-out acting loophole and glaring lack of logic that, among other things, translates into Delhi roads – notorious in reality for their traffic jams – obligingly emptying themselves out to accommodate high-speed car races and chases at all times of day and night. 

The reason why Drive is set in India’s capital city is because a robbery is being planned in Rashtrapati Bhavan. The primary players in this game are a group of car racing aficionados, an outsider who infiltrates their inner circle, a criminal known simply as King – you know, like Don in Don – and corrupt bureaucrats. 

The opening race in Drive is reasonably well done, the song ‘n’ dance that follows is kinda nicely choreographed by Adil Shaikh, and Jacqueline Fernandez has some cute moves in it. From then on it is a downhill descent. 

Gaping gaps in the plotline recede into the background in the face of ordinary car chases that routinely look plastic and an embarrassingly low-brow extended climax that feels like the work of an entry-level animation student. Lightning McQueen’s universe appeared more real than the vehicles and roads in several of this film’s scenes. 

Much has been made of the fact that a portion of Drive was filmed in Israel, making it the first Bollywood venture to be shot there. The media has reported that the film was also partly funded by that country’s government. The true mystery here is why the Israeli sarkar thought this film would be a good ad for them in India. Be assured that what Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is to New York City or Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is to Spain, Drive is absolutely not to Tel Aviv. At best the city is treated like the geographical equivalent of an ‘item’ number chucked mindlessly into a bad Bollywood film – it springs up out of the blue and it has no relevance whatsoever to the storyline.

In the face of such mediocrity, analysing the screenplay almost feels pointless. But a job is a job, so consider this. Without giving anything away let us just say the only way the masterplan revealed in the climax of Drive could possibly have worked is if no one in Rashtrapati Bhavan’s entire security department checked a critical character’s ID carefully for several days. 

Granted that this point arises only in retrospect, and granted that this person could have had the world’s top creator of fake IDs backing them, so instead consider this question that comes up quite early in the film. (Some people may consider this paragraph a spoiler) The loot could not have been where it was unless other critical characters managed to easily beat the security system in the Indian President’s residence for what must have been months, if not years. If you have visited Rashtrapati Bhavan and experienced the tight restrictions in place in the complex, you would know how ridiculous this is. How the crooks aced the system is never explained, we are simply expected to accept that they did because we are told so. (Spoiler alert ends)

Or consider this. Person X says in the end that they were expecting to be deceived by Person Y. But in an earlier scene when X realised they had been double-crossed by Y, the facial expression – clearly visible in close-up – is one of shock and not at all “oh well, I knew this was coming”.

Or this. In a key scene in Drive, a quartet of cars zips through an airport runway and the occurrence seems not to be a blip on the radar of Air Traffic Control (ATC), the local police or the news media at that point or for the two months that the story continues. This writing laziness is intentional – having ATC, the police and press notice the breach would have been too much of an inconvenience since it could have meant the kingpins of the gameplan being discovered before the writer wanted them to be, you see. 

Or consider this. Snazzy cars with the words “Delhi Police” emblazoned on them zoom about the city, offering evidence of how little the team of Drive knows the reality of the capital’s ill-equipped force. 

As for the acting, well, Pankaj Tripathi does lend a Pankaj Tripathi touch to his character, but really, how is one to seriously and fairly critique the performances in such a film?

For a moment let us set aside thoughts of the cast though, and Johar, Netflix and Israel. Let us take that moment to mourn the fact that this sub-standard action flick has been made by the same director who gave us Dostana, which, notwithstanding its resemblance to a Hollywood film, was, in its own way, pathbreaking in the Indian social context. From Dostana to Drive is such a fall.

Rating (out of five stars): 1/2

CBFC Rating (India):	None
Running time:	119 minutes

This review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/drive-movie-review-sushant-and-jacquelines-prettiness-and-an-under-par-heist-come-wrapped-in-awful-sfx-7588511.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(2019_film)

REVIEW 740: MADE IN CHINA

Release date:	October 25, 2019
Director:	Mikhil Musale
Cast: Language:	Rajkummar Rao, Boman Irani, Mouni Roy, Sumeet Vyas, Amyra Dastur, Gajraj Rao, Manoj Joshi, Abhishek Banerjee, Paresh Rawal Hindi

For a country that is virtually a baby producing machine, we are oddly hesitant to talk about sex outside our bedrooms, and there too, very often not. 

It took Hindi filmdom several decades to evolve beyond showing flowers and birds nudging each other in parks as a stand-in for human couples. But in the past 10-plus years, there has been a gradual attitudinal shift as Bollywood has finally acknowledged that girls and boys take off their undergarments while, err, doing the deed (Pyaar Ke Side Effects, 2006), that some couples need sperm donors to help them conceive (Vicky Donor, 2012), that erectile dysfunction is a thing (Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, 2017), women menstruate (Padman, 2018), women masturbate (Veere Di Wedding, 2018), sexual dysfunction and venereal disease are a thing too (Khandaani Shafakhana, 2019). Who knew Bollywood had it in them?

The latest in the tiny trickle of Hindi films with a plot pivoted on sex and sexuality is the Rajkummar Rao-starrer Made In China, based on the book of the same name by Parinda Joshi. Rao here plays a Gujarati youngster forever on the lookout for a new business idea. Raghuveer Mehta’s entrepreneurial efforts keep flopping, but he remains undeterred. Then one day in China, he receives a proposal to market an aphrodisiac in India. The catch is that its main ingredient is illegal. 

Revise that: Raghu’s primary challenge in this matter turns out not to be that he has to sell in the grey market, but that his product occupies a grey market in the Indian mindspace where taboo subjects are stashed away. This calls for ingenuity on his part and leads to some comical and occasionally bizarre situations. 

Before the film gets to Raghu’s business experiments though, there is a death. That, in fact, is how Made In China begins: there is a death in Gujarat and the prime suspects are Raghu and his business partner, the sexologist Dr Vardhi played by Boman Irani. 

From the start, it is evident that director Mikhil Musale is aiming at being a thriller with a message and a certain whimsy. He gets his look and feel right with the aid of some atmospheric production design, cinematographer Anuj Rakesh Dhawan’s moody, low-lit frames, boisterous songs and a particularly memorable, ominous zithery background sound that brings to mind buzzing insects. 

There are places at which the narrative gets funny too. Very very funny. A scene in which Dr Vardhi gives a sex talk to a conference of adults who were expecting something else is an absolute hoot without once resorting to icky or immature double entendre. But considering that Rao and Irani are in fine fettle here, Made In China surprisingly feels at all times like a film that is about to lift off but never quite takes flight. 

A large part of this is due to the tonal and logical inconsistency in the narrative. There is, for instance, no explanation for Raghu’s cheery attitude during his interrogation by the investigating authorities, an off-kilter element that particularly impacts Made In China because it is a running thread throughout the film. 

There is no explanation either for why Raghu hides his latest business from his wife with whom we are led to believe he has a close and non-traditional relationship. As evidence of this, they have been shown swilling alcohol together, sharing a cigarette (both points are very high on Bollywood’s list of Things Liberal Women Do) and discussing her orgasms. She also supports him unflinchingly in the face of his family’s contempt for his many failures. Yet somehow he is too ashamed to tell her that he is producing and peddling an aphrodisiac, and her reaction when she learns the truth ends up justifying his fears. If this is meant to be a comment on the superficiality of contemporary liberalism, it is not convincing. 

Made In China also drags in long stretches. When Rao and Irani are not together on screen, the storytelling lacks spark, which is disappointing considering that the supporting cast is full of actors with proven talent. Even an overly-made-up, forever-dressed-to-the-nines Mouni Roy as Raghu’s wife Rukmani brings a certain panache to her performance, but how convincing can an actor be when her lavish wardrobe and perfect face distract so completely from her claims of financial struggles? 

At one point, Raghu gathers this wisdom from a character played by Paresh Rawal who ends up being his business guru: “The customer is a ch*****,” says the man. The epithet is muted but since it is heard as often as prepositions and conjunctions on the streets of north India, it is understood that viewers know the word he repeatedly mouths and Raghu dutifully echoes – that’s part of the joke, of course. It is tempting to play on their vocabulary and accuse Musale of making a ch***** of his audience, but that would be off the mark because there is an interesting concept somewhere in this film that has been lost in execution. 

Made In China fails to hit the bull’s eye because it sorely needed an evening out of pace and tone, depth of characterisation and detailing in the plotline. The best thing about it are Rao and Irani who are a pleasure to watch even in this middling affair.

Rating (out of five stars): **

CBFC Rating (India):	UA
Running time:	130 minutes

A version of this review has also been published on Firstpost:

https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/made-in-china-movie-review-rajkummar-rao-conjures-up-a-certain-whimsy-but-in-a-half-done-film-7553431.html

Photograph courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_In_China_(2019_film)