The Netflix film about Punjab’s biggest popstar is an staggering achievement for Diljit Dosanjh, and a return to form for Imtiaz Ali
In Mehsampur (2018), a surrealist piece of docu-fiction, filmmaker Kabir Singh Chowdhry parodied the intentions of a Mumbai-based filmmaker descending on the eponymous village to make a movie about the cold-blooded assassination of folk singers Amar Singh Chamkila and Amarjot Kaur. The one-and-a-half-hour film cast Chamkila’s real associates — actress-singer Surender Sonia, his former manager Kesar Singh Tikki, and dholak player Lal Chand — to play fictionalized versions of themselves. In that, Mehsampur seemed intent on underlining the manipulations of biopic filmmaking, delineating the kind of eyes interested in exploiting a tragedy in the name of recreating it.
The selfish and self-absorbed filmmaker that Chowdhry conjures up in Mehsampur is certainly a far cry from Imtiaz Ali, the Mumbai-based filmmaker who did descend upon rural Punjab to make Amar Singh Chamkila, a biopic about the Elvis Presley of Punjab. But there’s one commonality between the reel and real filmmakers — they are both outsiders in the story they intend to tell.
Indeed, a Hindi film about Punjab’s biggest popstar certainly offers cause for concern: the film’s star Diljit Dosanjh has himself admitted to having apprehensions about the project when he first became involved. But if the filmmaker in Chowdhry’s imagination operates from a place of moral superiority, then Imtiaz Ali, the filmmaker behind Amar Singh Chamkila, comes from a place of deep fondness for the ingenuity of the musical tradition and artistry employed by Punjab’s brightest grassroots star. By narrating the legend of the singer through his own music, one that has permeated a wider consciousness since his murder in 1988, Amar Singh Chamkila is both a staggering achievement and a return to form for Imtiaz Ali.
The man and the music in his head
Punjab has routinely figured in Imtiaz Ali’s almost two-decade long filmography, shaped by the lyrical and musical renderings of his trusted collaborators Irshad Kamil and AR Rahman. But Amar Singh Chamkila marks a thorough immersion — Imtiaz Ali leaps at the contradictions of the state with abandon, untangling complex ideas of the shapeshifting memory of art, censorship, and the political instability of the 1980s with the biting wordmanship of Irshad Kamil, the electric soundscapes of AR Rahman, and the expressive face of Diljit Dosanjh.
Co-written by Imtiaz Ali and Sajid Ali (Laila Majnu), Amar Singh Chamkila opens on March 8, 1988, the day the singer (played by Dosanjh) — all of 27 — and his second wife Amarjot Kaur (Parineeti Chopra) were gunned down as they arrived in Mehsampur for a show. Their deaths arrive out of nowhere, a seemingly harmless moment acquiring meaning with unrelenting gunshots. Working with cinematographer Slyvester Fonseca, Ali stages their deaths as matter-of-fact, the brutality of the scene (a shot of Dosanjh’s face taking in the face of his killer is haunting) rendered effective by how quickly it ends. The action unfolds over the night following the singer’s death until his funeral the next afternoon. It is within this timeframe that Ali condenses the last decade of the singer’s life, employing flashbacks, oral storytelling, and multiple perspectives as narrative devices to trace his evolution from Dhanni Ram, a Dalit factory worker to Amar Singh Chamkila, Punjab’s highest record-selling artist of all time.
Over the course of the 146-minute runtime of the film, Ali remains unaffected with solving the mystery of Chamkila’s murder (“Jiss wajah se chamka woh, uss wajah se tapka,” notes Kamil’s lyrics in the pulsating “Baaja.”) even as the film sheds light on all the possible suspects. What the makers choose to reckon with instead is the juxtaposition of fame and infamy in the reception of Amar Singh Chamkila’s music, something that continues to be central to his legend.
Amar Singh Chamkila is another Imtiaz Ali love story, a compelling iteration of his signature romanticism.
That is to say, Amar Singh Chamkila is another Imtiaz Ali love story, a compelling iteration of his signature romanticism. Even in this film, the all-consuming nature of love is put under the magnifying glass, in particular its ability to offer salvation after complete destruction. But unlike past Imtiaz Ali romances, this is a love-story of a man and the music in his head (the comparisons to Rockstar is inevitable, although slightly reductive). So even when the world sees Chamkila’s music — raw, unflinching, and full of double entendres — as a reflection of purported misogyny and toxic Punjabi masculinity, the film and the singer sees his music as an extension of his own self.
A boisterous love story
It’s a daring approach that is elevated by Dosanjh and Chopra’s pitch-perfect casting as the duet-singing duo. Dosanjh is simply magnetic as Chamkila, plunging into the depths of the singer’s pluck and versatility with a singular commitment. He disappears into the character of the singer, both the teenage and the adult versions, not only with sincerity but more importantly, with the kind of grace that might have come across as affected if it was an actor conveying it.
That’s not to say that Dosanjh isn’t an accomplished actor himself, but more that he approaches this role from the point of view of someone who is a musician first; someone who deeply understands the unbridled burdens of their craft being the makers of their own destiny. It helps that Dosanjh meets his match in Ali, a filmmaker who works overtime in unleashing the latent potential of the actor’s sadness through his eyes. Chopra, similarly, offers pause to the racy proceedings with her presence; Ali outlines their romance simply on the weight of Dosanjh and Chopra’s chemistry which reads between the lines to project why these two musicians were so drawn to each other in the first place, like moths to a flame.
On his part, Ali envisions an imaginative and playful universe for the film, his staging infused with both tragedy and comedy, an antidote to the somewhat verbose screenplay. There’s the Imtiaz Ali stamp on every inch of the template of a biopic. The production design and costumes are rich with detail as is Fonseca’s lensing, which has a nostalgic quality to it.
There is a breathless mix of set-pieces, animation, archival footage, split screens (a shot of a cop looking into the window of a past is beautiful), visual effects, and superb song sequences (Naram Kaalja becomes rewarding with every watch) that the filmmaker employs in the storytelling that elevates both its form and tone. Still, none of it would be possible without Aarti Bajaj’s carefully calibrated editing, single-handedly splitting and splicing time, infusing poetry into what could have been a haphazard structure.
If the idea is to have viewers spend much of the film in anticipation, then Ali and Bajaj surely succeed in that mission, constructing Amar Singh Chamkila as a film where danger seems to always lurk in the corner. Which is to say, the film is at its strongest when the filmmaker brings his attention back to the singer, excavating the moral complicity and hypocrisy of the godmen, rival musicians, militants, and more importantly, the upper class who enabled the narrative against Amar Singh Chamkila. Was his crime the fact that he wrote songs about illicit affairs, alcoholism, and the brash masculinity and corrupted society? Or was it his crime that he refused to eschew his own identity?
Ali doesn’t necessarily offer all the answers, but he does ask some pertinent questions in Amar Singh Chamkila. Some of it is because of the film’s flattened politics. The screenplay does address the singer’s Dalit identity — a defining altercation sees Dosanjh’s Chamkila being subjected to caste slurs by an upper-class show promoter and his caste identity remains an underlying thread in the film’s understanding of Chamkila’s subservient worldview. But it also feels frustrating when the film occasionally takes a simplistic route in its understanding of caste-based oppression. The dissent, then, is implied rather than made explicit. Like the singer, Ali doesn’t waste too much time in contemplation, focusing instead on doing what he does best: telling a boisterous love-story that holds your attention and extracting career-defining work from his collaborators.
