Fear and Loathing – and fact and fiction – in MEHSAMPUR
Image courtesy: Dark Matter Pictures
Past and present, real and unreal, urban and rural, and life and death clash to present Mehsampur, Kabir Singh Chowdhary’s unforgettable film out of the Punjabi heartlands.
There is a moment in one of the penultimate scenes of Mehsampur (2018), when the lead character Devrath Joshi—who also happens to be making a film within the film, and making the actual film you’re watching (much more on this bizarro, experimental narrative later)—leads his co-‘actor’ and unwitting companion Lal Chand into a dark crevice. It’s a dangerous moment, but Devrath has an uncanny power of persuasion, and like Lal Chand, we, the viewers, continue to follow the questionable lead deeper into danger, too.
And then, in a particular moment of discomfort, Devrath’s phone rings.
Image courtesy: Dark Matter Pictures
He's annoyed at being disturbed. Huffing and puffing and sweating, he answers. “What the fuck? I’m in the middle of something,” he says to the caller. “I’m in the middle of a cinematic breakthrough… Don’t call me right now.”
A man on a singular, concentrated mission, Devrath could be forgiven for hyperbole. But the makers of Mehsampur—the movie about Devrath’s movie—have every right of projecting their own sense of the moment through their bumbling lead character. They are, indeed, in the middle of a cinematic breakthrough, for Mehsampur takes leaps rarely attempted in Indian cinema—or the cinema of the world.
Presented by Dark Matter Pictures, Mehsampur is the full-length, solo directorial debut of Kabir Singh Chowdhry, who also appears in the film. It is written by Akshay Singh, who also appears in the film. The chief character, Devrath Joshi, is played by Devrath Joshi, who is also a credited cinematographer. In an exploration of a real-life crime in the heartlands of Punjab in the 80s, a close associate of the victims—Dholak Master Lal Chand—is played by Lal Chand himself.
Before we see anything in Mehsampur, we see a disclaimer: Any resemblance to actual events, to persons living or dead, is not unintentional. The double-negative is, indeed, intentional. It becomes a running theme in the film, where our expectations of reality are constantly, and often delightfully challenged. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred, sharpened, and blurred again.
Here’s what’s real: In 1988, thirty years before the release of this film, popular Punjabi singer Amar Singh Chamkila and his wife Amarjot were shot dead by a gang of armed young men in Mehsampur, a small village in Punjab’s Jalandhar district. Chamkila was known by many as the ‘Elvis of Punjab’ and considered a legend in the Punjabi folk music industry. Despite his popularity, he faced criticism and threats for releasing music considered obscene and filled with sexual innuendo. He was 27 when he died.
But Mehsampur isn’t Chamkila’s story; it’s Devrath’s. The lone, low-budget filmmaker from Mumbai drives into what he calls “really the insides of Punjab” to research, reveal, and re-enact Chamkila’s assassination. The early shots of Mehsampur, like the opening disclaimer, feel purposely vague and laden with double-meaning. The cinematography and camera shots give away no hints to whether we’re watching a documentary or a filtered fiction. We’re somewhere in the murky middle space. Is this real? Is this guy an actor? Is there a film crew—a la The Office—following him around? Or is there no ‘meta’ level to anything, and Mehsampur is a ‘normal’ feature that doesn’t break any fourth walls?
The double-negative is, indeed, intentional. It becomes a running theme in the film, where our expectations of reality are constantly, and often delightfully challenged. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred, sharpened, and blurred again.
We get some clarity in the next scene. Devrath is filming a documentary about Chamkila and Amarjot with his handheld camera. He’s unprofessional and brash. He gets in the face of his subjects (actors, or ‘real’ people?) and asks them about Chamkila. He only gets one answer. “Chamkila is a dead man.”
Mehsampur will eventually become ‘clearer’ as Devrath lands in Ludhiana: it’s a feature film about the making of a documentary featuring real people playing themselves intermingling with fictional characters, who, often, also play themselves. In one scene, Devrath interviews the singer Surinder Sonia in her home, played by the real singer Surinder Sonia. In another, he asks Chamkila’s former manager Kesar Singh Tikki to do a re-enactment of a drunken act he performed decades ago in broad daylight.
These moments—and many more—are unsettling, amusing, and fascinating, as we witness real people playing a (barely) fictionalised version of themselves. Tikki’s dramatisation of his own story is particularly memorable. Onlookers are amused and confused, just like us in the audience. The scene is both weird and hilarious, and it's something that we've never seen before. It's "not unintentional".
Mehsampur takes the viewer vividly close to the sensory world in which it operates. Often, the action is seen through Devrath’s own handheld camera, the low-budget film inside the film. We hear the natural sounds of this world of the “really insides of Punjab”: prayer calls from the Gurudwara, rumbling tractors, beeping traffic, the slice of a blunt blade over a shaving man's rustling cheeks, a voyeuristic and uncomfortable night of passion.
Reality and unreality clash as, wherever Devrath goes, a larger and richer film crew has been there before. It’s as if he’s chasing the shadow of a ‘better’ film about Chamkila, witnessing the creation of the world (or the film) in a dimension above him.
We get the sense that Devrath is either completely inept at his job or a complete genius, that he knows nothing about his craft, or is thinking two steps ahead of everyone else. He needles the other characters to reveal their most private sides. In another voyeuristically close scene, Lal Chand shows Devrath the mark on his inner thigh that he claims is from a bullet, from the same attack that killed the real Chamkila thirty years ago. He was the only survivor on stage.
Devrath the character (or the real person?) manages to be both a paradox and an open book. His blank expressions and unpredictability can often make one wonder what he’s thinking, about his agency, about what he hopes to achieve with his adventure… But often, the easiest answer makes the most sense. He wants the simplest of things at the lowest common denominator: to drink, to have sex, to finish the movie. He is able to entice his fellow characters with money, opportunity, and sometimes, force, to stay on his path—and his persuasiveness doesn’t always go to plan.
That plan finally gets rolling when Devrath—along with the two other dominant characters in the film, Lal Chand and Manpreet—get on the road from Ludhiana to Mehsampur, heading towards the scene of the famous murders. Even in a narrative as nontraditional as they come, we begin to see the story build up and complicate in knots, to see the tension rise. We anticipate the moment where something could go all wrong.
It is in Lal Chand and Manpreet (Navjot Randhawa), two characters essential to Devrath’s quixotic quest, that we see the knots tangle further. Manpreet is a mysterious woman Devrath meets in Ludhiana, and later, the Amarjot to his re-enactment of Chamkila. She’s distressed and hysterical throughout the journey, regretting her liaison, looking for escape, asking for help. Devrath, concerned more with the script he’s written for her, shouts in a great moment of tension and danger, “Is the drama working or not?”, unaware that the most dramatic thing in process is his own life.
Image courtesy: Dark Matter Pictures
In reading Amarjot’s role, Manpreet begins to embody the person she’s been bestowed. It is her character—the only major role that is fictionalised—that might leave the viewers asking for more. Manpreet is presented first as a mysterious sex symbol in the bar, and later, as the fallen woman in regret. Her complexity is limited to the two stereotypical male gazes on a woman: seductress and hysterical. There is a lack of depth here in both extremes, and Manpreet’s shift from one to the other simply didn’t feel satisfactory enough.
In the village Mehsampur, the adventures of Devrath, Manpreet, and Lal Chand descend into a deeper abyss and disarray. The priorities of the lead characters change. Filmmaking styles flip to signal a shift of mood or the pace of the narrative. Often, these shifts of filmmaking styles feel scattered and sporadic, where visual effects exist for the sake of visual effects, change for the sake of change. The film and the documentary and the past and the present collide, and we descend into (not unintentional) absurdity.
Mehsampur’s experimental narrative and depth made it one of the most celebrated Indian films of the last few years—despite not having a traditional widescreen release. The film world-premiered at the 2018 Sydney International Film Festival, and had its India premiere at the 2018 MAMI (Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) festival, where it won the Grand Jury Award. It won the Best Sound Design at Mosaic International South Asian Film Festival 2019 and the Best Editing at Diorama International Film Festival 2019.
A few months ago, Aseem Chhabra—on Rediff—chose Mehsampur among the best 200 films of the decade. Its influence is sure to bleed into the next decade, too, promises exciting work in the future for its director, Chowdhary, and writer, Singh—the latter who also wrote the screenplay of Ridham Janve’s critically-acclaimed recent release The Gold-Laden Sheep & the Sacred Mountain.
Filmed in Punjabi, Hindi, and English, Mehsampur is a clash of Indian cultures. It acknowledges the filmmakers’ own external gaze as the Mumbaikar Devrath journeying into the Punjabi heartlands. It portrays the dark sides of each world—urban and rural—and the relatable humanity of both.
[Lal Chand] operates as the unwilling guide for Devrath and the viewers in the narrative, showing us flashes of the world he has survived, capturing decades of tragedy into the daily sorrow of his eyes. The sorrow for the past, the sorrow for the present, the sorrow from his real history, and the sorrow of their fictions.
The arranged marriage of the two worlds—of Lal Chand’s priorities and lifestyle compared to Devrath’s—creeps in as one of the film’s most intriguing themes. The concept of filth is explored: filth that made Chamkila and Amarjot the target of their assassins; and filth that permeates in the face of Devrath and Manpreet as they go about hoping to re-create that very assassination.
If Devrath is the unreliable narrator of Chowdhary’s excellent film, Lal Chand is its soul, the wormhole between the past and the present, the intentional and unintentional, between documentary and feature film. The aging musician operates as the unwilling guide for Devrath and the viewers in the narrative, showing us flashes of the world he has survived, capturing decades of tragedy into the daily sorrow of his eyes. The sorrow for the past, the sorrow for the present, the sorrow from his real history, and the sorrow of their fictions.
Lal Chand performs this feat organically, playing himself in real and imagined worlds, straddling fact and fiction, and uniting them with ease in each scene. In chasing Chamkila’s story, Mehsampur finds its own, using fact as an inspiration for fiction, and like Lal Chand, creating something new. It becomes the film that Devrath imagines making, the film outside of him, a cinematic breakthrough.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in The Literary Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
