‘Kanneda’ Series Review: All Ambition, Little Guile
The eight-episode series struggles to capture the Punjabi immigrant experience in 1990s Canada.
Director: Chandan Arora
Writers: Nishikant Kamat, Sudipto Sarkar, Sandeep Jain, Rajiv Walia, Chandan Arora
Cast: Parmish Verma, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Ranvir Shorey, Arunoday Singh, Aadar Malik, Jasmin Bajwa
Streaming on: JioHotstar
Kanneda, the title of this eight-episode drama, is “Canada” pronounced with a Punjabi twang. The theme is clear — an Indian immigrant story that unfolds in the awkward cultural gap between Kanneda and Canada. The setting is Vancouver in the 1990s; the narrator helpfully tells us that racism is rampant and Punjabis continue to be treated as second-class citizens. The central character is Nirmal ‘Nimma’ Chahal (Parmish Verma), a young and hotheaded chap who slowly mutates from fairytale to cautionary tale. It’s a familiar journey: Nimma starts off honest (a rugby scholarship to kickstart a music career), before losing faith in the system and getting into the drugs-and-gangster business. Flashbacks allegedly suggest that his family left Punjab during the 1984 Anti-Sikh riots, but his trauma looks anything but generational.
Kanneda is beset with a B-movie aesthetic. It’s what we call first-draft film-making. The acting is largely campy and stilted; the camerawork is full of burnt-out frames and natural-light gaffes; there’s very little colour correction; the dubbing sounds incomplete; the writing is formulaic. At one point, a husband starts mansplaining with a “swimming against the tide” proverb. The sentence keeps getting away from him. His wife finally responds with “And that’s why I hate literature and wordplay”. Can you blame her? Nimma falls in love with his best friend’s sister, Harleen, the moment he sees her changing clothes in the backseat of a car; a glimpse of her body warms his heart. At another point, Nimma the drug dealer draws the line at human trafficking; he unironically repeats his mother’s teachings when his boss mocks him for being a hypocrite. Every conversation in a moving car is hard to focus on because of the fake green-screen backgrounds (and uneven breeze). It’s these kinds of careless details that puncture the sincerity of the theme. It’s as if the story takes on so much — first-gen immigrant aspirations turning toxic in a foreign land; conflicted cops; gang wars, white-collar criminals — that it fumbles the basics of storytelling.
This isn’t the first high-profile show with a fragile sense of craft lately. It seems to be a trend across platforms (The Waking of a Nation did itself no favours in this department), a worrying sign for a trope-generator streaming space that’s fast resembling the TV-soap model. The screenplay simply cannot multitask. The narrative sets out to spotlight Nimma’s rapping talent and his growing stature in the underground music scene. But the slain-Punjabi-musician vibe is forgotten. It gets so consumed by Nimma’s rise as a coke-snorting gangster that his identity as an artist becomes an afterthought. It is reduced to more of an abstract concept — where, apart from a few stray beats (and a random montage of Indians citing his importance when he’s in the hospital), there is no evidence of the landscape-altering rapper that he is. A couple of jamming sessions with his buddy, and passing shots of record label executives, do not a legacy make.
For a quasi-biopic that tries to capture a slice of history, Kanneda is both talkative and a raging introvert. Many scenes and dialogue volleys are staged indoors, and the light is never right. Nimma’s integration in crime boss Sarabjit’s cartel — and this Punjabi cartel’s rivalry with Chinese and Mexican cartels — is an interesting subplot. One can even forgive the trademark yellow filter during a Mexico meeting. But the tropes are the same: Nimma impresses, he becomes the right hand, attracts jealousy and deceit, gets power-drunk, then goes up against his mentor. His life is narrated by a policeman who knows so much that he sounds more like a stalker than an investigator. There comes a point when Nimma decides to be good after breaking bad, but it’s hard to tell his drug-induced spirit from his moral compass. The hurried production value brings to mind Chamak (2023), a series that wastes its Amar Singh Chamkila-inspired premise on a Punjab-for-dummies palette. Given that its second season is around the corner, it’s safe to assume that the technical aspect of storytelling is no longer top priority.
I have a soft spot for Arunoday Singh as an actor; he thrives on playing baddies who are at odds with their own physicality. His pulpy turn as cartel boss Sarabjit suggests that he’s at a stage where Akshaye Khanna was some years ago. He’s in on the joke, condescends on the air he breathes, and enjoys the unpredictability, just like he did in the first season of Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein (2022). He’s the only one who looks comfortable in the series — unlike Parmish Verma (who pitches Nimma as a hyper-angry person), Ranvir Shorey (whose white-collar role is consumed by a strange accent), and even Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub (whose broken-cop act is on autopilot). It all ends so hastily that you’d imagine Kanneda has a train to catch to New York. But then it’d become Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999), an Akshaye Khanna starrer that Bollywood-ized the South Asian immigrant experience in Queens. If Arunoday Singh played Khanna in a remake, I’d have no complaints.