Dunki2023

Raju Hirani’s film where his signature Cry-laugh-cry formula didn’t work for me at all. It didn’t land as I had intended. That classic Raju’s spontaneity in writing/direction was missing which made me not feel much for the characters. Almost nothing seemed natural. I expect Raju’s film to have seamless change in two different tones but here it was not the case. The real life topic that this is focusing on (From whatever I got online and last few seconds of the film), has so much depth, tragedy, emotions. This couldn’t translate into Raju Hirani’s “Packaged formula”. Maybe this needed a different treatment. Because towards the end when this Pritam-Javed-Sonu’s gem “Nikle the kabhi hum ghar se” plays and the choice of visuals Hirani chose had a completely different feeling to it. I felt like this should have been the overall feeling of the film instead of his usual comedy-emotional scenes and again some random comedy sequence. When that song and scene comes, I could finally somewhat feel these characters but sadly until then, characters weren’t set properly. Most of it felt like a parody, if I have to be straightforward about this. Tried too hard to like this, but film didn’t give much opportunity for me to love this. unfortunately my lowest rated hirani’s film so far.