If Imtiaz Ali’s films are acts of exaltation, Kabir Singh Chaudhry’s Mehsampur (the OG film about Amar Singh Chamkira) is a work of extreme despair. His two films dealing with the same subject could not be more different. Born from the same story, told by the same people, Amar Singh Chamkira Mehsampour and Mehsampour are an odd double bill, but they accurately capture the essence of the enigmatic singer, who was shot dead at the age of 27 along with his wife Amarjot. His suggestive lyrics and vulgar disregard for threats against his life made his feathers tremble. His murder remains unsolved.
In the same way that Ali’s films can turn into somewhat introspective pieces after a thoroughly enjoyable two hours, Mehsanpour doesn’t seem to mind the following. why Was Chamkila killed, or under what circumstances? The half-hearted Herzosian version of Mehsampour is a meta-commentary on the art of exploitation and the exploitation of art. On the commodification of death and the flexible nature of narrative. It seems more obsessed with the strange control Chamkira still has over the culture. In many ways, he is a ghost that continues to haunt those who once stood alongside him. Some of them appear as themselves in the film, desperate for someone to exorcise Chamkila’s soul from their souls.
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That person was a young filmmaker named Debras, who, with all the care and attention of a dog chasing a car, set off to the town of Mehsanpur to make a film about the singer. Deb is a rather annoying young man, the type who rolls his eyes and quietly walks away. And at various stages of his journey, the dark heart of punjab, you’ll wonder if he’s actually a filmmaker or just a madman with a video camera. But one thing is certain. He is Chaudhry’s replacement. Debrus’ initial interactions with local residents were not friendly. They treat him with hostility and suspicion. In Mehsampur, Chamkila is not the folk hero he was in Ali’s films. He is a ghoul, a reminder of a tragic past, a Gover Syntype that no one dares to talk about.
What unfolds is a formally ambitious but thoroughly frustrating character portrait 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 midst of a cinematic breakthrough”), Devras tracks down many of Chamkila’s old associates. The men, like the titular town itself, seem trapped in time. Dozens of filmed interviews with these characters are scattered across YouTube. They don’t need much of a nudge to start talking about claiming fame. Watching these men parrot the same things to curious YouTubers makes me wonder if I’ve wandered into a seedy corner of the internet, some kind of purgatory where the nature of reality is reshaped in real time. That’s enough to make me wonder.
Like Ali’s films, Mesampour mimics the feeling of reliving a story based on secondhand purchases.However, Amar Singh Chamkira A fairly common biography line By having his characters tell epic stories with hindsight, respect, and the freedom to ignore facts, Mehsanpur exposes the hypocrisy inherent in making films about the dead. And it does this in the most disturbing way. Chamkila’s first manager, Kesar Singh Tikki, agreed to be a part of Dev’s film in exchange for 5,100 rupees and a bagpipe player, ‘Kamba’. Dev reduced it to his Rs 3,100. At that time, Chamkila was charging much more for the ‘Akada’. That is the value of his legend, the film seems to say, morbidly paralleling the movement itself.
But Debrus wants to get his money’s worth, and rather than be satisfied with just an interview, he asks Tikki to show him around the city. They land outside Chamkila’s old office, where Tikki is repeatedly instructed to reenact the “scene” in which she drunkenly throws a brick at Chamkila’s window, furious at being left behind at a show in Canada. Ru. “Do it again, don’t mess around this time,” Dev said, and Tikki became like a pet dog, repeating the same command over and over until she fell and injured her knee. Passersby openly stare, but Tikki seems unfazed, shedding all inhibitions in his first few “takes.”
Debras also appeared to interview singer Surinder Sonia, with whom Chamkira had performed before meeting Amarjot. She’s just like Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, always ready for a close-up.’Dholak’ player Lal Chand survives a narrow death The day Chamkila and Amarjot were killed, pulls down his pants and shows DeBrus the spot in his crotch where he claims a bullet hit him during the gunfight. Is there a metaphor that better captures the film’s self-deprecating energy? In a separate interview online, Lal Chand said he was hit in the arm. Is nothing sacred? Oddly enough, he wears the same shirt both in his first meeting with DeBlas and in his random YouTube chats. Maybe it’s his “Let’s talk about Chamkila in front of the camera” costume. People like Tikki, Sonia, Swaran Sivya and Lal Chand have set up a kind of cottage industry in the wake of Chamkira’s death, peddling stories about Chamkira like drugs on the streets. Mesampour sees them this way. But when viewed through Ali’s sensibilities, these people are indistinguishable from travel storytellers.
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But Mehsanpur observes that the “protagonist” is not the only vulture pecking at Chamkila’s corpse. The film foreshadowed Ali’s film by perhaps a whole decade, when a rival production crew from Mumbai showed up and started poaching Dev’s connections, with Tikki jumping ship first. The name of the fictitious production banner behind this big-budget film is “Bantam Films,” which is a little creepy. Because Amar Singh Chamkira was shot by Sylvester Fonseka and edited by Anurag Kashyap’s long-time collaborator Aarti Bajaj. Kashyap’s credits also include the word “thank you.”
All this unfolded in Punjab, which was no different from the colorful, musical, fantastical world befitting an Ali film. In Mehsampur, Punjab, apocalyptic wasteland It’s home to a lonely Britney Spears singer and a grumpy drunk who makes a living reliving his trauma. To understand the difference in sensibilities in both films, you don’t need to know how they view the nation. “Mainhun Punjab” Chamkira sings in Ali’s film. In Mesampour, the characters gesture to the sadness of those around them and lament:Punjab ka yehi haar hai bhaisaab.”
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