Following the excellent “Buddha.mov”, Kabir Mehta continues his mockumentary approach towards filmmaking with “Nitty Gritty Punjab Police”, a short that actually feels closer to his first work, “Sadhu in Bombay”.
“Nitty Gritty Punjab Police” review is part of the Submit Your Film Initiative
This time, the protagonist is not a Sadhu, but a washed up police officer, Gyan Singh, who seems to embody everything that is wrong with the Force in India (to say the least) and be proud of the fact. His character becomes evident from the beginning, where he says that his son, who is also an officer (in a direct comment about the way policemen are chosen), needs some effort still, but he has no clue what to do with the female colleague that concludes the trio, who, for him, is completely useless. A number of puns of sexual and inappropriate nature, and an effort to make his son more of a man, just like his father, conclude the initial portrait.
Soon, however, Mehta's style of breaking the fourth wall in the mockumentary, also comes to the fore, with Gyan Singh starting accusing the director who is shooting the film for being useless, before he suggests that people who use Tik Tok are the ones who really know what they are doing. The particular videos, expectedly, focus on Punjab police, while the film concludes with the “subject” figuring out why the director is shooting the particular movie, with Mehta adding a distinct autobiographical element in the movie.
Mehta's purpose here is two-fold. The first is to mock the Singh police, something he achieves in a way that is as offensive as possible, with the brief sex scene bordering on being blasphemous and the same applying to the way the female officer is treated and the ways she reacts. The second is more personal, with him highlighting the reasons he shot this film, which has to do with his family and their professional capacities, an element that is intensified by their actual photos (probably).
The fact that the medium that leads to both these aspects is the ridiculously looking and acting Gyan Singh works excellent for the narrative, in an approach that moves far beyond the “rules” of the mockumentary, as a kind of an absurd re-imagining of a police documentary. Indarjeet Saharan in the protagonist role is excellent embodying the aforementioned absurdism to the fullest.
The overall result is funny, pointed, rather intelligent and another testament to the fact that Mehta is pretty close to mastering the particular genre.
