For the second time this month, a Persian song has a strange effect on a Hindi film scene. In Animal, the effect is perversely counterintuitive, a childlike folk song to celebrate the wedding of a debauched killer. But in Dunki, the song is at cross-purposes with the desired effect. A group of illegal immigrants from India run into a patrol in an Iranian desert. One of the guards orders them to run. He then walks to a vantage point and starts picking them off with his rifle. Every time we cut back to him, a catchy Farsi tune plays. I know he’s meant to be a sadistic villain, but the music and dangling cigarette and the way he’s shot just make the guard look incredibly cool.
You can tell this scene got away from the director. Rajkumar
Hirani's films might be unique and popular but they're never cool. His
protagonists are brawny goofs and kindly aliens and misfit geniuses: unformed,
bumbling, endearing types. No major Hindi film director has a more nondescript
visual style. He goes from slapstick to sentiment to sermon quicker than
anyone. Everything is planned. There’s always—always —a message.
Having successfully solved all of India’s problems in his
earlier films, Hirani turns a judging eye on immigration policies in the West.
Manu (Taapsee Pannu), Balli (Anil Grover) and Buggu (Vikram Kocchar) are
friends in a small village in Punjab in the mid-90s, all broke and
underqualified but desperate to move to England. They’re joined by visiting
soldier Hardy (Shah Rukh Khan), who’s charmed by Manu and becomes the group’s
de facto leader (there’s also the lovelorn Sukhi, a cameo by Vicky Kaushal). In
its slapstick first half, the film runs through the options available to
immigrants: fake marriages, forged certificates, student visa after passing a
language exam. When all these fail, a cheaper, more dangerous option is
suggested: overland from India to Europe on the ‘donkey’ route, which in the
film’s parlance becomes ‘dunki’.
This is Hirani’s first film since Sanju (2018) and
the allegations of sexual misconduct against him in an investigative piece some
months after its release. On the evidence of an early morning first-day
screening, he still has that direct line to the public that eludes most of his
peers. I continue to find his humour facile and his lecturing exasperating, but
he has a way of making viewers feel like they’re in on the joke. Hirani and
longtime collaborator Abhijat Joshi and Kanika Dhillon build simple ideas into
comic set pieces that ripple into other scenes, a system of delayed punchlines
and callbacks that's more formally impressive than actually funny. Nothing is
used just once—Buggu’s mother having to wear trousers is fodder for at least
half a dozen jokes.
The problem with construction this meticulous is you can’t
help but see scaffolding everywhere. For all their emotional excesses of their
films, I’ve always felt Hirani and Joshi treat their material with an
engineer’s detachment—every joke, every plot development a problem to be
solved. Dunki is a vacuum-packed 161 minutes, so bent on utilizing every
moment that its very industry becomes oppressive. There's a scene where Hardy
is overcome and Manu tells the others: “He's a soldier, let him cry alone.”
Yet, in the next shot, she's right with him, talking him out of his grief.
During the long ‘dunki’ passage, I was reminded of a film I
saw recently, Tewfik Saleh’s The Dupes (1972), also about dangerous
border crossings. The tension Saleh builds up is searingly emotional because we
feel the desperation of the people putting themselves in harm’s way. Hardy and
his friends face similar dangers, yet Dunki doesn’t have anything like
the same tension. The film is only interested in illegal immigration and the
refugee crisis to the extent that it allows Hirani and Khan to grandstand—one
especially blatant instance is Hardy saying he won’t ‘give gaalis’ to
his country to gain political asylum.
Hirani uses a 3 Idiots-like structure, introducing us
to old Manu and Hardy and then showing their story in flashback. It’s not a
fruitful decision, not least because Khan has spent so many years playing
younger than his actual age that his instincts for playing older aren’t as sure
(Pannu is better as older Manu because she doesn’t try as hard). After Pathaan
and Jawan this year, Dunki is a break from Khan the action star
but offers no respite from the Khan the perfect screen idol. It’s not as if
there’s anyone better-equipped in Hindi cinema to play a romantic feminist
soldier patriot friend. But Khan is always more interesting with kinks. I’d
like some grey in the soul to go with the hair.
No comments:
Post a Comment