The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison says its worthwhile tracking down the Hindi blockbuster DUNKI (Rajkumar Hirani, India, 2023)

Time was when Hollywood got stick for presenting a glamour version of life, with all the boring bits left out - the world of George Sidney. Well, the same contempt has been heaped on Bollywood for the much same reason. From this distance it’s hard to make a judgment, though Indian (that’s Hindi and all the rest) films are said to be occupying one in four of Australia’s release slots now. People must be going to them, because they keep on showing up. It would be interesting to know how many and where. There were three of us attending on the last night of the new Sha Rukh Khan movie Dunki during its one week run at Event Cinemas in George Street.

Back in the late nineties, before MTV impacted their industry, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge/Brave Heart Takes the Bride ran for three years, where a fortnight used to be considered good.  Lagaan hit the festivals. Yash Raj Productions and Sha Rukh Khan were regular highlights of our movie-going. Nice to find they are still in place.

Dunki has the old damp eyed sentimentality, knockabout comedy, bright colour and exoticism all set at the top of the dial ... and the big musical number, a spectacular affair featuring the Union Jack, comes more than a half hour in when we’ve had time to accept the film’s tempo. I was relieved to see the formula still played, though at 160 minutes it does hang about too long after SRK’s stout court room defense of Mother India. On top of this comes a detailed analysis of immigration. Our hero’s “When the British came to our country no one demanded they speak Hindi!” gets muttered approval.

Shah Rukh Khan, Dunki

The plot of Dunki has a flashback structure. The mature Indian immigrants, who have made a place in Britain, are stirred at the news that their idol Hardy/SRK is coming. We see him distracted from the finish line in his Laltu senior citizen’s athletics event. Our curiosity is caught as we try to figure out the circumstances that produced this situation.

Back in the Punjab, Hardy showed up to return the radio of a fellow soldier, who had rescued him on the battlefield, and our hero found himself teaching wrestling to the dead man’s sister, the rather fetching Taapsee Pannu – nice scene. With fellow nationals they find themselves needing to make their fortunes in Britain, represented by seeing a soppy romance film where the lead proposes to his intended in front of Big Ben. The monument will become an effective motif in the film – background to a human statue routine or reflected on the window of a passing car.

The wannabees are told of the three ways to enter – marriage, study or political asylum. Comic routines in Boman Irani’s incompetent language school prepare them with a lavatory song for their “Student Veejaar.” It leads to a plausible self-immolation with a handy kerosene stove. Not uncharacteristic for these, I still remember Lehk Tandon’s cheery 1962 musical Professor building to Shammi Kapoor’s mother getting stoned by the locals.

The situation comes down to Dunki, the donkey route of people smuggling. At the length of this one, there’s time for what would take up a complete film itself – striking effects work where a real bus metamorphoses into a toy on a map, circuitous border crossings, avoiding watchtower gun fire by walking under water and confronting a murderous Iranian patrol officer.

Disillusion faces the group at the end of the trip. Dog walking locals don’t understand why they need to be told they are in Britain. An understanding judge is unable to endorse their good will. Of the many hazards they encounter, the sham marriage to a doper in a giant, so nice church is particularly vivid. When we get to the present day the group find themselves forbidden to re-enter their native land and in the hands of another Dunki immigration agent. The film comes up with a sting in the tail documentary sequence which will upset preconceptions.

The scripting is unpredictable and clever and the staging first class. This is a top of the line item. Writer-director-editor Rajkumar Hirani is one of their industry’s key figures. His Three Idiots got some action abroad but I was more taken with his P.K. and Muna Bhai MBBS films. The new entry may not be his best but it benefits from the imposing presence of Khan at the head of a strong cast.

Forget about the celebrated canon. It’s instructive to remember that most of the several millions of fans who think Shah Rukh Khan is the world’s greatest star have never heard of Robert Bresson or Pedro Almodovar any more than their critic and festival programmer admirers accept SRK. It’s simple minded (and racist) to automatically believe they are wrong … and it cuts the viewer off from some of the most involving work being done in this troubled period of film making.

It will be an effort to track down Dunki in our erratic local distribution scheme but it is a great way to bring the situation into perspective.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison tracks down CREATION OF THE GODS 1: KINGDOM OF STORMS (Wu Ershan, China, 2023) and JAWAN (Atlee Kumar, India, 2023)

Not so long ago we had unprecedented access to the films of China and India - and not a few more - in dedicated cinemas and video stores. Where did all that go? Well not really all that far. The multiplexes now run their product in late sessions, sometimes to empty houses and occasionally in ones sold out.

Wu Ershan’s grim new Block Buster Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is getting a down town first run. This one offers monster budget myth as special effects piece and is being touted as the second biggest earner in the history of the Chinese film. Actually it logs in about number twenty eight but its owners are talking it up big with an eye to the overseas market - European musical scoring and script participation by James Schamus, long time collaborator with Ang Lee, including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

The film opens with the usual captions on graphics explaining the descent of the Shang Dynasty from the Gods, to rule a China divided into four territories, the governor of each having to send a non heir son to the Shang court to participate in the hostage Legion of the Disinherited. It is this that the Shang ruler sends against a rebel province (where have I heard that description before?) under the command of his own son Fei Xiang who is scornful when the commanders are repulsed by a fire barrier, which their horses will not cross and sends them back with the animals blindfolded.

The now defeated governor is pursued by two of the Legion Commander sons who overtake him and his alluring daughter Narana, who they feel it would be wasteful to slaughter with her father. They bring her back to Fei Xiang for his victory celebration. Bad move guys! Her pupils narrow to those of a cat. Yes she’s a Fairy Fox in human form, who sets about bewitching the macho leader. His solution to the disturbances is to have a massive funeral pyre which - promises, promises - he will ascend to assuage the wrath of the Gods.

It’s not long before people are assassinating their children or parents as part of the royal power struggle and the concerned gods dispatch ancient sage comedian Huang Bo, in loads of make up, with the enchanted message stick, to impose control. The convoluted plot is spaced by mass action footage and, rather better, a bit of erotic by-play like the scene of the power couple bathing together naked in the milky pool with Narana’s floor length hair trailing in a circle round them. 

It looks like things get sorted but a couple of epilogues tell us that the fox demon will have it all going again for part two.

We recognise a mash up of Shakespeare, Eisenstein, John Woo and Kurosawa (the fake head in the bag is instantly Ran). Westerners would be battling to follow events or to find a focal point for their sympathies in three hours of all this violence within families. Origins in the Chinese classic “Investiture of the Gods” from sixteen hundred AD would be known to its home audience, if not from the original, then from adaptations like the Xu An’s 2016 Feng Shen Bang / League of Gods 3D, which similarly buried Bingbing Fan and Jet Li in CG effects work.

It all left me yearning for the great days of Chu Yuan and the Shaw Brothers whose fantastic costume melodramas packaged this kind of material with welcome self deprecating comedy - at considerably shorter length.

The great days of (mainly) Hong Kong movies were succeeded by the great leap forward in Twenty first Century Hindi Cinema which followed the arrival of MTV in India. Front runners were the Jash Rash productions with their imposing stars Sha Rukh Kahn and Amitabh Bachchan, who now make joke promotion videos about giving roles offered them to one another.

Despite the difusion of interest through Bengali, Tamil and Sanskrit regional cinemas (not however the English language productions), Yash Rash is still a thing and Atlee Kumar’s new Jawan is a big hit for them. It offers the old Yash Raj over production even before SRK shows up again. 

Our superhero makes a spectral looking entry as he arrives to take down the hoard of red star soldiers conducting a village massacre. It’s not long before that looks like him again running the hijack and terrorising of the commuter train with ransom demands by ‘phone to the Minister, bringing his own fake hijab casualties, like the bank bandits in Un Flic, before blending in with the crowd, like the team in the 1981 John Huston Victory - all backed by SRK's personal Charley’s Angels. While we are processing that, our hero, rendered youthful, shows as the governor of the model women’s prison sheltering all the green uniform inmates (OK digitally populated aerial shot intro) which provides a haven for arrestees who never re-offend. Confused - that’s the idea.

Throw in successive production numbers, like the one where our high stepping hero does his routine in the red shirt, the “Fly Away Little Birds” dance and becoming progressively more virtuoso till we get to the finale where a couple of him dance together while the motion capture camera. weaves around them.

As a follow up to the red star soldiers, we get Bhopal style industrialists backed with goon squad heavies and money from the Mafia (who are making a comeback as movie heavies - Equalizer 3) Our heroes out smart them by holding the countries' voting machines ransom, when it looks like the election will be bought, complete with the spectacular highway stunt action piece where the veteran biker retainers fan out to make a moving wall and truck loads of bribe money blow in the wind. It takes a super cop to battle our super heroes, so Sanjav Dutt (Munna Bhai himself) makes a late appearance - ripple of audience recognition.

Despite virtuoso touches this one is too nasty, too loud and too simple minded to recommend to the outside audience that once lapped up their industry’s Lagaan, Mohabateen and Robot - when they had the chance.