16 months after the first six episodes of this searing series on music and crime in Punjab, the remaining episodes started streaming on SonyLIV without a murmur. I don’t know why the streamers are so quiet about it. SonyLIV has done worse, much worse.
Rohit Jugraj’s take on the chaotic sinister folk-singing tradition in Punjab, is belted out in a melting pot of simmering aspirations. Those who have followed the craggy path of Kaala’s musical odyssey would know his is no ordinary ‘raaga’-to-riches story.
One of the pleasures of watching the series is to see the startling transformation of actor Paramvir Cheema into Kaala Singh, a mercurial singer who fears none and respects only his own abilities. It is a character with a huge bedrock of brio. Cheema nails it, whenever the stocky script lets him.
The problem here is, there is too much going on that is unfocussed, or worse, irrelevant. Frequently the narration moves into places it cannot afford to, and I mean that in both the emotional and budgetary sense.
Some of the crowd sequences look like a bunch of bystanders waiting for the light to turn green at the traffic signal. Rohit Jugraj’s narration works best when it converges on the characters, some of them besides Kaala are well-etched and played by actors who know how to make it look large. The ever-dependable Manoj Pahwa as Pratap, the quintessentially slimy music producer and talent mentor, is bang-on. Some sequences such as the one Pratap Deol is being massaged, overstates his reprehensible character.
Subtlety is not a strong point Chamak. Rohit Jugraj goes for the jugular even when the crisis on hand demands a less radical approach. The actors get the point in unexpected motions of angst-projection. Mohit Malik as Pratap’s elder son has some interesting scenes especially in the hospital after Pratap’s assault when the tables are turned on a brash cop.
Chamak is a damaged depiction of damaged people. There are no heroes in the series, not even Kaala who strikes us as a man of seriously limited intellect with a talent to sing about the vicissitudes of life that Kaala doesn’t really understand. Throughout the lengthy series, Kaala remains a bright defiant singer with no sense of propriety, a rebel with a cause that he can’t quite decode. Kaala knows he is angry but he seems clueless as to why, and from whom he wants to extract revenge.
This is a dodgy series about unreliable characters who can’t be trusted to tell the truth about themselves. It is a world defined by wounds with very little scope of healing.
