Mehsampur

An opening title card references the murder of a popular 1980s folk-singing duo, Chamkila and Amarjot, in the Punjabi city of Mehsampur, India. The pair were controversial due to their innuendo-laced lyrics, which offended some religious zealots, and their loss remains deeply felt all these years later. Director Kabir Singh Chowdhry’s wild, kaleidoscopic movie is a mashup of reality and fiction, with nuances and insider references about the killing of Chamkila and Amajot that will be missed by outsiders lacking cultural context. And Chowdhry is too busy being clever to provide such context, visually quoting the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick in rapid-fire cuts that are accompanied by grating noises. The story centers on a struggling filmmaker named Devrath (played by Devrath Joshi, a real-life movie director portraying an absurd version of himself here), who is traveling around the state of Punjab with a small video camera, doing research for a proposed feature about Chamkila and Amarjot. Much of the time viewers are watching Devrath’s live recording of his awkward, off-putting conversations with the late performers’ old bandmates and associates. And things get even trickier when Chowdhry films Devrath recording a professional film unit as it smoothly shoots the very Chamkila and Amarjot feature that Devrath wants to make (the movie becomes a film-within-a-film-within-a-film). A subplot about a young actress who deeply regrets becoming sexually involved with Devrath just to be in his movie is easily the most disturbing element in this disjointed film that also features a graphic sex scene. Not recommended. (T. Keogh)