Team FC
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.
Dukaan is centred on Jasmine Patel, a young woman who loses her husband in the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, enters the surrogacy business to pay for her stepdaughter’s wedding, becomes progressive, and then goes absconding after getting too attached to her fourth baby-bulge.
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 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 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.
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’.