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.
