Dunki

 

  I have to admit, the name did throw me off but it turned out to be an amazing movie. The basic premise is that three friends, Manu, Balli, and Buggu, want to go to England for opportunities since they each have their respective problems in their town, Laltu, in India. Shah Rukh Khan’s (SRK) character, Hardy, visits this town and most of the movie is them trying different ways to get to England, and around the last quarter of the movie, Hardy brings these three characters back home. There are very few movies I have seen that put me through a range of emotions and this is one of them. 

   First, I loved the character arc of Hardy. He starts out the movie falling in love with Manu but is separated for 25 years. When they eventually reunite he discovers she has brain cancer and she is about to die. One of his main dreams that he has throughout the movie is to propose to her in front of Big Ben but when he is not able to do it in London, he recreates the experience in Laltu. I feel like this is one of the best scenes in the movie. It shows Hardy trying so hard to impress Manu like elaborate decorating the house or programming speakers to play the sound of the Big Ben. SRK also does a great job conveying how much Hardy loves Manu. Most of the scene shows Hardy trying to impress Manu, but you slowly see his happiness and excitement leave him. The camera then pans over to Manu and you see her slouched over, implying that she’s dead.

   First of all, I love how you watch most of the scene through Hardy’s emotions and you don’t actually see Manu dying. When I was watching this, Manu’s was actually a surprise for me since I had genuinely assumed the movie was going to end with a happy ending, like most Hindi movies. However, I find that not showing Manu until the end makes this scene much more powerful. This is similar to how in the third episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we don’t actually see the Southern Air Temple get massacred by the fire nation but we only see the result and Aang’s reaction. This makes the scene much more poignant since it leaves it to the audience’s imagination how brutal the massacre was. Similarly, only showing Hardy’s reaction makes the audience try to figure out what is happening. I believe that making the audience think rather than just spoon-feeding them is what makes a film great. 

   Second of all, when Hardy sees Manu die, he doesn’t start screaming or profusely crying. The director could have easily made this a cliche emotional scene by amping up the orchestra and making SRK act very dramatic. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes this is necessary but I just don’t think that’s the type of relationship Hardy and Manu had. Instead, Hardy tries to make it seem like nothing is wrong. He puts the ring on her finger as if she said yes to his proposal and just hugs her. In my opinion, this denial makes the scene even more emotional since he is trying his hardest to be happy. When I watched this scene, this happiness reminded me of the happiness he had when he helped his friends get to London so it felt even more sad that despite helping so many people out and trying so hard to impress Manu, he couldn’t get the one thing he wanted most: Manu’s love. I feel like this unfairness is what makes an emotional scene powerful.

   There were also hilarious scenes. For example, I really enjoyed the scene where Buggu swears on his grandmother’s life that he will not think about going to India but the movie cuts to the next scene showing the grandmother dead. In Indian culture, or at least in my culture, it is common to swear on someone like your grandmother to prove that you won’t do something because you obviously don’t want them dead so I thought it was really funny how they used this idea in the movie. Throughout the movie, there was lots of sarcasm and one-liners which kept the mood up.

   Finally, there were scary scenes where I genuinely felt scared and disturbed. For example, there’s a scene where Hardy, Manu, Buggu, and their relatives are crossing Afghanistan when a military group captures them. The military officer lets three of the relatives go and they start running for their lives. However, the officer ends up shooting them as try to run away as if he’s playing just a game. This was pretty disturbing to watch. The movie also juxtaposes the killing of these three helpless people with an upbeat song playing on the radio of the military officer which makes the scene even more creepy and evil. There is also a scene where one of the characters burns himself to death after hearing that his lover committed suicide which was also quite disturbing to watch. I feel like scenes helped show how hard the life of these people were and I felt they were a great addition to the movie. I loved how the movie ranged from really funny scenes to emotional scenes to these terrifying scenes and this kept me engaged throughout the movie.

   I am also a huge fan of the songs in this movie. I have found that I usually don’t enjoy recent Hindi movie songs since they usually try to copy American music so they’re bad from a Hindi and American point of view. A good example of this, in my opinion, is “Chammak Challo” by Akon. However, songs like “Lutt Putt Gaya” and “O Mahi” in this movie were fun to listen to and watch.

   If I must critique something about this movie, it is how sometimes the plot was not really believable. For example, I found it kind of unrealistic that Hardy becomes so close with the people of Laltu. I feel like there are just not enough events that occur to justify why he wants to help Manu, Balli, and Buggu to go to London. I felt like his transition from just a stranger who visits Laltu to a close friend of these three characters could have been much slower to make it more realistic. However, I think that this was just shortened to cut the already long runtime of the movie.

   Comparing Dunki to modern Hindi films, I would say this is one of the best because of its uniqueness. Just like their music, I feel like the Bollywood industry is just trying to copy Hollywood but they’re behind which makes it even worse. For example, Yash Raj Films, one of the major film studios in Bollywood, has recently created its own cinematic universe called the YRF Spy Universe. This is very similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe where heroes are living in a shared universe except the heroes are Indian spy agents. I get that these action movies are probably really popular in India, but as an American growing up with Marvel, I just can’t help but feel like these filmmakers don’t truly care about creating something interesting but just want to make as much money as possible. Don’t get me wrong, action movies can be good, but just like any good film, they have to be unique. For example, the James Bond franchise had all sorts of futuristic gadgets and special effects and the Mission Impossible franchise took stunts to a whole new level. However, I feel like these Bollywood filmmakers are just taking what exists and trying to harvest as much money as possible.

   On the other hand, Dunki tells a truly unique story. Not a lot of movies are about immigration so this movie shines new light on this subject. It shows how hard people try and how dangerous it can be. It also shows the tough realities of living as an immigrant and how sometimes, immigration is not always the solution. The main characters are very determined to go to England but once they reach there, they realize that it’s not like what they imagined. These are things that I haven’t really thought about in my life so it was very interesting seeing these ideas presented in a movie.