‘Dunki’ Turns Immigrant Struggles into a Hopeful Comedy-Drama

Right from its contemporary opening scene—a flash-forward to present day—Dunki reveals that its central romance doesn’t work out. It opens 25 years after the film’s main narrative, as an ailing, middle-aged Manu Randhawa (Taapsee Pannu) stages a delightful escape from a London hospital, conning her way past watchful nurses in order to meet up with two old friends: restaurant janitor Balindar “Buggu” Lakhanpal (Vikram Kochhar) and tailor Balli Kakkad (Anil Grover). Sick of living abroad, Manu wants to return to India, but an immigration lawyer lays out the many complications before her, since she made her way to England without a passport 25 years ago. So, the trio decides to get back in touch with their old friend (and Manu’s old flame), Hardayal “Hardy” Singh Dhillon (Khan), now an aged athlete in Punjab, who’s so excited by Manu’s call that he stops mid-footrace to answer. Hardy once helped Manu, Buggu, and Kakkad get from India to the London in the first place, and now, they see him as their only hope to get back home.

The old friends decide to catch up in Dubai (where neither group is subject to as much immigration scrutiny), and as they make their way by air, Buggu’s sweet and personable voiceover takes us back to the mid-1980s, when the London-based trio were starry-eyed youngsters in Laltu, a zany and fictitious Punjabi village, from where they hoped to emigrate to the United Kingdom in search of a better life. The ensuing visa circus, however, proves expensive and humiliating, between the mountains of evidence required, including funds they don’t have, and the urgent need to become fluent in English, a language these Hindi and Punjabi speakers don’t know beyond a few pop culture imports. But once the former soldier Hardy visits Laltu (to repay a debt to one of his comrades), the four of them become bound by circumstance, and decide they’ll stop at nothing to make their dreams come true.

The most instantly notable thing about Dunki (for long-time Bollywood fans, at least) is how overtly it echoes mid-’90s and early-2000s hallmarks starring Khan, especially those in the then-popular “N.R.I nostalgia” (Non Resident Indian) sub-genre, which focused on Indians abroad as they yearned for their native cultures. Dunki’s opening shot, in London, chooses its location carefully: Trafalgar Square, home to the iconic opening scene of the 1995 rom com Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (or DDLJ), the ostensible birth of the N.R.I. nostalgia genre, and the film that arguably made Bollywood a global commodity. Dunki quotes DDLJ’s iconography ad nauseam, between the striped rugby jersey in which Khan first appears in both films (to rapturous applause), and lush shots of yellow mustard fields—a quintessentially Bollywood image. Other Khan-led N.R.I. nostalgia vehicles are evoked as well, from a send-up of the gaudy, jingoistic national anthem scene in the London-based Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and even a major plot element from the New York-set Kal Ho Naa Ho (though one best left un-spoiled).

However, while this subgenre focused on upper-class Indians abroad (whether they were immigrants or western born, they sounded and dressed Indian; the target audience was always domestic), Dunki’s approach shifts this focus to a lower economic strata. In the film’s first half, both its comedy and drama—each unfurled through editing juxtaposition—are entwined with the rigorous immigration process and its unrealistic expectations for poor Indians. The movie’s tone often swings between knee-slapping and downright devastating, but these shifts are both deeply character-centric and deeply earned, mirroring the vast and often unhinged expectations placed upon would-be immigrants just trying to live their lives. It’s a true-to-life depiction of the way the visa process can weigh on you for months or years at a stretch. Even if you find camaraderie, as the leading quartet does, the brightest and most optimistic moments can still be interrupted by a sudden, looming sense of dejection and anxiety, as though your entire sense of worth were about to be determined by a white stranger with a stamp, to whom you’re little more than a case file.

The film runs two hours and 40 minutes, and much of the first half follows its four leads as they attempt to learn English under the tutelage of Geetendar “Geetu” Gulati (Boman Irani), an idiosyncratic teacher who’s barely fluent himself. With the help of fellow desperate student Sukhi—played by Vicky Kaushal, in a small but powerful role as a lovelorn man trying to reunite with his sweetheart abroad—the group begins searching for ludicrous loopholes in this herculean process. This linguistic rigmarole gives rise to riotous situations, as they try to turn the tables on the system itself. However, the options most of them end up left with are dangerous at best.

Hirani’s deft tonal control allows this tragicomedy to give way to intense drama after its intermission (which most American theaters will likely skip past). The group, led by the military-minded Hardy, makes their way on foot and on a series of rickety transports (boats, trucks, even shipping containers) across the Middle East in the hopes of reaching London and starting a new life. Some of the ensuing scenes are plucked out of an action fantasy, though their stark departures from the film’s otherwise breezy tone helps hammer home just how treacherous and hopeless this journey feels (even though we know at least three of them make it safely). However, despite what the film concocts from thin air, many of its hapless scenarios are actually pulled from real stories of immigrants being smuggled across borders in tight spaces, at great physical and psychological cost.

Although this middle section features wince-inducing hardships, it ends surprisingly quickly, but the life awaiting Manu, Buggu, Balli, and Hardy on the other side isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Their dreams in Laltu never had to reckon with the harsh realities of undocumented immigration until they stepped foot on British shores. Hirani, in these London-set scenes, continues to zig-zag expertly between dramatic and comedic tones, entangling the fun and exuberant parts of the characters’ lives in a foreign land with the immediate dangers they face, and the cons they’re forced to pull, as the inevitability of a romantic rift between Manu and Hardy starts to loom. Even the dreamy idea of Bollywood romance can’t withstand visa bureaucracy.

Even the dreamy idea of Bollywood romance can’t withstand visa bureaucracy.

Like most mainstream Bollywood social dramas, Dunki isn’t content to make its point subtly or implicitly. Instead, it takes the well-worn route of a pivotal courthouse scene, in which Khan makes broad and explicit appeals to a judicial authority, as though he were delivering a PowerPoint presentation on immigration statistics, and racial and colonial hypocrisies. However Khan, as always, knows his audience. Like his charismatic political appeal in Jawan—in which he all but tells the audience which way to vote—he overflows with sincere emotions here, hamming it up to 11 as only he can do.

Between the iffy wigs and old-person makeup in early scenes, the bright, comedic lighting design by the movie’s cinematographers (C. K. Muraleedharan, Manush Nandan, and Amit Roy), and the fine-tuned melodrama of Khan’s performance, Dunki crafts a stage-like feel, as it invites its audience to not only watch the film, but play within its space. Even its distinctly cinematic flourishes—like brief flashbacks within the main flashback, shot and presented as if on faded 4:3 film prints—have a mischievous quality typical of Hirani’s family comedy-dramas, which deliver their broad socio-politics by making them as accessible as possible.

Granted, in modern Bollywood, this also means being forced to digest a few hints of nationalism here and there (Hardy is a soldier after all), and ultimately, Dunki shares some of its aims with the N.R.I. nostalgia films it initially deconstructs. While a more realistic depiction of immigrant struggles, it also frames the characters’ intervening 25 years in London as a life of total isolation, completely lacking in any sense of joy or immigrant community. The original ’90s and 2000s movement was, in part, a cultural response to “brain drain,” i.e. Indian students and workers leaving for better opportunities abroad. This concern can’t help but feel like an implicit catalyst in Dunki too, as though its subliminal message were “Don’t leave, or you’ll regret it.”