Dukaan Review: A Muddled Mix of Biology, Bhansali and Salty Surrogates

Directors: Siddharth Singh, Garima Wahal
Writers: Siddharth Singh, Garima Wahal
Cast: Monika Panwar, Monali Thakur, Soham Majumdar, Sikandar Kher

Runtime: 122 minutes

Dukaan is what happens when Mimi (2021), Vicky Donor (2012) and Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) narrowly survive a plane crash but resort to cannibalism after getting stranded in the arid wilderness of Kutch — only to die of food poisoning instead. This is the kind of film that makes you lose your appetite and sanity at once. It’s a story about surrogacy that reduces pregnancy to a Bollywood aesthetic, film-making to a giant montage and science to a musical hashtag — while also objectifying women under the garb of empowering them. Somehow, it manages to push both Bhansali and biology back by decades. The poster shows an army of village belles with protruding bellies, hinting at a thriving dukaan (market) of surrogate mothers. The film takes this idea and runs with it straight off an exotic cliff: Either the women (“child machines”) have flat stomachs or stay 9 months pregnant – or they have perfectly toned abs seconds after delivering. Middle ground is for haters.

The film is poorly written, shot, staged, directed, edited, scored and acted. No department is spared. Time is a construct in this narrative: Years pass if you look away during one of the several unimaginative songs, and if you’re really lucky, a wardrobe changes. The transitions have the creative depth of a driving ticket. When a doctor screams “push kar” during childbirth, the scene literally cuts to the town of…Pushkar. When someone cites the importance of educating female children and making them Saraswati (goddess of knowledge), it cuts to an actual school named Saraswati Vidya Mandir. When a rich foreigner (we know they’re rich because they stub their cigarettes next to fancy cars) complains that she’s come all the way from Israel to find a capable womb, I expected the film to cut to the White House in Washington — but alas, it missed a trick. Even the cinematography is woeful: The shots are overexposed and out of focus, and the camera assumes that opening a scene with the reflections of people on glass tables is cool. Kites flying in the sky look like gentle computer screensavers. The only thing that kept me going through the film’s 147 minutes is the anguished voice of a gentleman seated behind, who went “Oh Shit!” every time a woman’s water broke on screen. 

Dukaan is about a young Gujarati woman named Jasmine Patel (Monica Panwar) who remains young for 15 years. No, let’s try again. Dukaan is the story of Jasmine Patel, a small-town girl whose hero-entry moment is botched up by a side-angle shot of her face. No, again. Dukaan is centred on Jasmine Patel, a young woman who loses her husband in the 2001 Gujarat earthquake (attention to detail level: A bottle breaks), enters the surrogacy business to pay for her stepdaughter’s wedding, becomes progressive (a live-in partner is introduced and forgotten), and then goes absconding after getting too attached to her fourth baby-bulge. She brings up the boy in Pushkar (what if the doctor had yelled “Mum, bhai!”?) for four years, names him Jamaal, gets arrested, and promptly vows to win back custody from his wealthy parents. To do this, she must first restore the image of the disgraced surrogacy clinic, which is designed like a bazaar where rural ladies desperately offer their services to snooty clients at the gate. She must also fight for the visitation and involvement rights of surrogates across India; their post-birth alienation is established by the shot of a heartless client burning the surrogate mom’s letter to the child on Diwali. 

Why all the drama, though? Jamaal is rechristened as ‘Diyamaan’ by his actual parents — a couple whose names are, wait for it, Diya and Armaan — so I’m pretty sure the kid would have left them anyway. Never mind that Diya (the woman, not the boy) behaves like an aspiring psychopath (she threatens the ‘retired’ Jasmine with a knife in their first meeting — it works wonders), and Armaan mumbles like a college hacker whose porn-watching schedule is constantly interrupted. At one point, Armaan mentions that their traumatised son might need some ‘training’. Counselling is the word, Monsieur Heart-hacker. At another point, we see Jasmine sitting on a bench with another boy, apologising for not being around (“ours was never a love story” it seems) — and we remember that Jasmine did have a son named Dhaval with her late husband. She wasn’t ready to be a mother back then. The film belatedly remembers this, too, and quickly inserts this scene so that Dhaval doesn’t grow up to be a serial killer after being forgotten by everyone — a spin-off I’d have paid to watch (Dukaan: A Dare-Dhaval Story). 

To put it politely, the performances are shaped by this film. Monica Panwar was charming as a streetwalker in Mast Mein Rehne Ka (2023) – and stole the show(s) in both Jamtara and Choona – but Jasmine and her tribe often sound like they’ve invented a new language by combining Hindi and Gujarati. At some point, I might have dozed off and dreamt of Sunny Deol in a Federer cap breaking the fourth wall to lecture us, and I opened my eyes to see Sunny Deol in a Federer cap breaking the fourth wall to lecture us. That’s what Dukaan does: It blurs the lines between bad fiction and worse facts. To rephrase the first line of this review: Dukaan is what happens when Mimi kidnaps the love-child of Vicky Donor and Gangubai Kathiawadi and names him Vickywadi — only for a commercial aeroplane to crash into them. Maybe the pilot needed more ‘training’.