If Imtiaz Ali’s film is an act of exaltation, Kabir Singh Chowdhry’s Mehsampur — the OG movie about Amar Singh Chamkila — is an exercise in extreme despair. No two movies about the same subject have ever been more different. Born out of the same stories, told by the same men, Amar Singh Chamkila and Mehsampur make for an odd double bill, but one that accurately captures the essence of the enigmatic singer, who was gunned down at the age of 27 alongside his wife Amarjot. He’d ruffled feathers for his suggestive lyrics and bawdy disregard for threats against his life. His murder remains unsolved.
Like Ali’s film, which, after a broadly enjoyable two hours, turns into a rather self-reflective piece, Mehsampur doesn’t appear to be concerned about why Chamkila was killed, or under what circ*mstances. Halfway Herzogian, Mehsampur is a meta commentary on the art of exploitation and the exploitation of art; on the commodification of death, and the malleable nature of storytelling. It appears to be more obsessed with the odd hold that Chamkila still has over culture; in many ways, he’s a ghost that continues to haunt the people who once rubbed shoulders with him. Several of them appear in the movie as themselves, desperate for someone to exorcise Chamkila’s spirit from their souls.
Also read – Amar Singh Chamkila: Imtiaz Ali set out to make a movie about the slain singer, but he made a movie about himself instead
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That someone is a young filmmaker named Devrath, who journeys to the town of Mehsampur to make a movie about the singer, with all the meticulousness of a dog chasing a car. Dev is a s rather annoying young man, the sort you roll your eyes at and quietly walk away from. And at different stages of his journey into Punjab’s heart of darkness, you wonder if he’s actually a filmmaker at all, or just a lunatic with a cam-corder. But one thing’s for sure; he’s a stand-in for Chowdhry. Devrath’s initial interactions with the locals aren’t friendly; they treat him with hostility and suspicion. In Mehsampur, Chamkila isn’t the folk hero that he was in Ali’s film; he’s a ghoul, a grim reminder of the past, a Gabbar Singh-type that nobody dares speak about.
What unfolds is a formally ambitious but altogether frustrating character study that has more in common with Taxi Driver than anything else. With delusions of grandeur — in one scene, he declares that he is in the ‘middle of a cinematic breakthrough’ — Devrath tracks down many of Chamkila’s old associates; men who appear to stuck in time, much like the titular town itself. Dozens of filmed interviews of these characters are littered across YouTube; they don’t need much of a nudge to launch into stories about their claim to fame. Watching these men parrot the same details to inquisitive YouTubers is enough to make you wonder if you’ve slipped into a seedy corner of the internet, a purgatory of sorts where the nature of reality is reshaped in real-time.
Like Ali’s film, Mehsampur mimics the feeling of reliving a story based on second-hand accounts. But while Amar Singh Chamkila takes the rather conventional biopic route of having characters narrate an epic tale, equipped with hindsight, reverence, and the liberty to ignore facts, Mehsampur exposes the inherent hypocrisies involved in making a movie about a dead person. And it does this in a manner most unsettling. Chamkila’s first manager, Kesar Singh Tikki, agrees to participate in Dev’s film in exchange of Rs 5,100 and a ‘khamba’ of Bagpiper. Dev brings it down to Rs 3,100. Chamkila charged more for an ‘akhada’ back in the day. That’s what his legend is worth, the movie appears to be saying, while morbidly going along with the exercise itself.
But Devrath wants to get his money’s worth, and instead of settling for just an interview, he asks Tikki to show him around town. They land up outside Chamkila’s old office, where Tikki is instructed, repeatedly, to re-enact the ‘scene’ where he drunkenly hurled a brick at Chamkila’s window, enraged at being left behind for a show in Canada. “Do it again, this time don’t fool around,” Dev says, as Tikki is reduced to a lapdog, carrying out the same instructions over and over, before falling down and injuring his knee. Passers-by stare openly, but Tikki seems unfazed, having shed all his inhibitions after the first few ‘takes’.
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Devrath also shows up to interview Surinder Sonia, the singer that Chamkila used to perform with before he met Amarjot. She comes across like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, perpetually ready for her close-up. The ‘dholak’ player Lal Chand, who narrowly escaped death the day Chamkila and Amarjot were killed, pulls his pants down and shows Devrath a spot on his groin where he claims to have been struck by a bullet during the shootout. Could there be a more in-your-face metaphor for this film’s masoch*stic energy? In a separate interview online, Lal Chand said that he was hit in the arm. Is nothing sacred? Curiously, he’s wearing the same shirt in both his first meeting with Devrath and in the random YouTube chat; perhaps it’s his ‘let’s talk about Chamkila on camera’ outfit. People like Tikki and Sonia, Swaran Sivia and Lal Chand have made a cottage industry of sorts out of Chamkila’s death, peddling stories about him like drugs on the streets. This is how Mehsampur views them; filtered through Ali’s sensibilities, however, these people are indistinguishable from travelling storytellers.
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The ‘protagonist’ isn’t the only vulture pecking at Chamkila’s corpse, though, Mehsampur observes. The movie foreshadows Ali’s film perhaps a full decade in advance, when a rival production crew from Mumbai shows up and begins poaching Dev’s contacts — Tikki is the first to jump ship. The name of the fictional production banner behind this big-budget movie is ‘Bantam Films’, which is slightly eerie, because Amar Singh Chamkila was shot by Sylvester Fonseca and edited by Aarti Bajaj — Anurag Kashyap’s longtime collaborators. Kashyap also gets a ‘thank you’ in the credits.
All of this unfolds in a Punjab that couldn’t be more different from the colourful, musical, fantasy land that was shown in, and was appropriate for Ali’s film. In Mehsampur, Punjab is a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by lonely singers belting out Britney Spears and morose drunkards whose livelihoods depend on reliving their trauma. To understand the difference in both films’ sensibilities, one needn’t look further than how they view the state. “Main hoon Punjab,” Chamkila sings in Ali’s film; in Mehsampur, a character gestures at the sadness around them, and rues, “Punjab ka yehi haal hai bhaisaab.”
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Post Credits Sceneis a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.
