In a scene from Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki, a fishy Indian lawyer based out of London offers three runaway immigrants a solution to their visa problems. One can be bought, the other can be arranged and a third requires begging. You can live in England, if you are prepared to beg for political asylum, he tells them. It’s the most political of all fixes. “Bolne mein kya hai. Akhbar mein thori na chapwana hai. Kya farak padta hai,” he says. To which Hardy, played by a terrific Shah Rukh Khan - the only one out of the four unwilling to go down the route – says, rather solidly: “Soldier hun. Farak to padta hain.” It’s a scene that emblematises the message behind Dunki. The homeland isn’t merely a painful pock of earth you work to estrange yourself from. It’s an organ of your body. An organ that you can never truly separate yourself from, no matter how much grief and suffering it comes to represent. There is something militaristic about that kind of yearning for a land you feel both belittled and loved by. To which effect, Dunki is a hilarious, charming and ultimately bittersweet film about literal and sociological homecomings.
The story begins in London, where three ageing friends have decided to return to India. The only problem is they can’t get a visa. Old and feeble, this seemingly eclectic bunch calls Hardy (Shah Rukh Khan), the man who can supposedly fix the knottiest of problems. He is the man we are told that got these three to the promised land of a foreign country in the first place. We then go back in time, to twenty-five years ago, when a younger Hardy arrives in Laltu, a small Punjabi town to return a tape recorder. Charmed by Manu (Taapsee Pannu), and propelled by her economic strife, he decides to stay back and help. There are the others, including Balli (Anil Grover), Buggu (Vikram Kochhar) and Sukhi, played by a scene stealing Vicky Kaushal.
This ragtag bunch dream about going to England for a variety of reasons. Someone wants to assist his ailing mother in paying the bills, someone wants to buy back an ancestral property. Sukhi wants to purely go for love. This is a film of two halves. The first one is spent doling out easily accessible punchlines that borrow from the average Indian’s anxiety about an elitist language. Every now and then, though, this air of self-deprecation is punctured by a melancholic Sukhi, a beeping reminder of the agony that forced transformations come with. It’s a startling performance, by an actor who doesn’t even need his other half, to play that trauma of disassociation off of. He can look loveless, lonesome and beaten, all on his own.
The second half of the film switches tracks, tones and scenery, as if a switch has been flipped on your conscience. Motivation and angst turn into desperation. The group decides to do a ‘Dunki’, a loose pseudonym for illegal migration via the donkey route. From here on, the narrative follows a fairly even path, with epiphanies about the indignity of borrowed statehoods, the bottled definition of home and the myth of affluent immigrant lives. Until of course the well of distance brims to the point of ambivalence about need and desire. You may be agnostic about where you live but death demands a certain conviction. The diaspora might not be too keen on this one, is one way of putting it.
As far as performances go, Khan is delightful in a film that needs him to be the vessel for its many shifting tones. That he is a former soldier – not much else is shared about his family, etc., though – also plays into the fold of a narrative that though it puckers with laughter, and self-aggrandizing silliness, plays out in the grim shadow of a developing sucker punch. That punch when it comes, comes out of left field for the story is brave enough to not offer you a self-congratulatory high. Instead, it urges you to consider the cost of abandonment. The abandonment of not just your land, but of every story that then becomes a fragment of someone’s memory of you. Neither here nor there, so to speak.
This is by no means Hirani’s subtlest film, but it is emotionally and politically resonant in the context of a prevalent global conversation. It has the usual Hirani-sms - a well-fleshed-out bucket of characters, an emotional turnkey whose appearance and disappearance flip the narrative (remember Jimmy Shergill in Munnabhai), and a general air of absurdity that tunnels through what is essentially another underdog story ambling towards amnesty for its many grievances.
Dunki is hemmed in by a love for the homeland, and is the most direct Hirani has ever been about his messaging. Interestingly, and maybe divisively, it delivers that message through both the ones who left and the ones who decided to return. Everyone kind of eventually gets what they set out for. Except it comes at great personal costs. Some are worth paying. Some, maybe not.
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