4 Stars (out of 4)
Watch Amar Singh Chamkila on Netflix
Filmmaker Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila is an all-time great music biopic and one of the director’s finest works. His use of varied storytelling techniques makes for a riveting exploration of the life of a controversial celebrity.
In the 1980s, Amar Singh Chamkila (Diljit Dosanjh) and his duet partner and wife Amarjot Kaur (Parineeti Chopra) ruled the music scene in Punjab with their cheeky, catchy tunes. The movie opens with the couple’s assassination on March 8, 1988, along with two members of their band.
As their bodies are ferried away, a song begins, and performers akin to a Greek chorus sing about Chamkila’s life as seen from different perspectives. Some of the singers are characters who will be important to the film going forward, while others stand in for the masses who adored Chamkila.
The montage cuts between groups of singers, all of whom emote directly to the camera with abandon. Rival musicians are hostile, while the older guys who sing about Chamkila being a “horny” guy give some great lascivious looks. Same for the saucy ladies who confess to listening to Chamkila’s music secretly. It’s so effective and so fun. (Ali brings the ladies back later for an excellent, raunchy number performed with maximum sass.)
The film’s present-day action takes place on the evening of the murders, as those who worked closely with Chamkila narrate flashbacks to his beginnings. His drunken former friend Tikki tells everyone in a restaurant how he found Chamkila working in a sock factory. Entourage member Kikar Dalewala fills the cops in all the folks who wanted Chamkila dead, from conservative religious groups who considered him a corrupting influence to rival singers whose livelihoods were damaged by his success.
What made Chamkila so popular was his willingness to write about the stuff of neighborhood gossip, things like a brother-in-law spying on his sister-in-law while she bathes, or randy old men. He wrote them as duets: a back-and-forth between a man and a woman. The first singer he works with, Sonia, is reluctant to sing dirty lyrics until she sees the crowd go wild for them.
Dosanjh is a wildly popular singer in his own right, and he infuses Chamkila’s lyrics with his own energy and charisma. The casting of the women singers in Amar Singh Chamkila is brilliant. While Sonia and others are good, they don’t sound right with Chamkila — until Amarjot comes along a few years into Chamkila’s career. Then everything falls into place. Chopra had never sung on a film soundtrack before, and she absolutely nails the part of Amarjot. Being tutored by the legend A. R. Rahman — who wrote original music for the film with lyricist Irshad Kamil — undoubtedly helped.
Throughout the movie, Ali intersperses images of publicity photos and album covers featuring the real Chamkila and Amarjot, often alongside recreations by Dosanjh and Chopra. It’s a reminder of how careful Ali and his co-writer Sajid Ali were when telling the couple’s story.
A note at the start of Amar Singh Chamkila clarifies that some liberties were taken for the sake of the movie. Nor is it meant to be comprehensive. While Chamkila sang about violence and drugs, most of the songs in the movie are about sex, including hits like, “Brother-In-Law, Check Out My Booty.” Still, the movie does a good job placing Chamkila’s career and his social importance within the context of Punjab during a time of rising violence and economic hardship.
The film’s greatest success is showing just what made Chamkila a superstar. His music is really catchy. The give-and-take between him and Amarjot is fun. Their songs and performances lifted people’s moods when there was plenty of reason to be down.
Chamkila has been referred to as the “Elvis of Punjab,” and the comparison is fitting. Both grew up in rural poverty. Both became bigger sensations than they could have dreamed, inspiring an insatiable voracity in their fans. That adoration was offset by critics who viewed them as obscene. There was no way either singer could stop being who he was, and they both died young as a result. It’s no surprise that both artists inspired truly great biographical films: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis in 2022 and now Imtiaz Ali’s Amar Singh Chamkila. Both deserve it.
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