Preet Harpal clears his throat right before delivering his first major monologue in Myself Pendu, and if I am being entirely honest, that little bit of rough audio left in the final mix set the tone for the next two hours. Punjabi cinema has spent the last decade trying to polish every jagged edge off its output to compete with big-budget Hindi films across the border, yet here is a project that occasionally feels like it was edited in a basement during a rolling blackout. Dheeraj Rattan steers this vehicle through territory that should feel familiar to anyone who spent the early two-thousand-thousands watching standard-definition VCDs rented from a strip-mall grocery store, relying on tropes about rural innocence colliding with urban flash that we have all seen recycled a dozen times already. The narrative structure bends and cracks under its own weight roughly forty minutes in, introducing subplots involving real estate scams and estranged cousins that vanish without leaving any meaningful residue on the characters.

There is a specific kind of awkwardness to the way Sayali Bhagat moves through these rustic backdrops, looking every bit the Bollywood refugee trying to remember if she left her stove on back in Mumbai while reading lines in a phonetic cadence that never quite settles into natural Punjabi rhythms. She plays the city girl forced into a dusty village with a permanent expression of mild annoyance, which works well enough when she is reacting to Harpal’s swaggering incompetence. Harpal himself plays the titular pendu with an exhausting, relentless energy that stops just short of being charming, leaning hard on physical comedy that involves a lot of dropped agricultural equipment and exaggerated double-takes at passing tractors. It is a performance built out of loud shirts and wider grins, missing the subtle observational humor that made classic comedy albums from the region actually endure beyond their release week.

Jaswinder Bhalla shows up to do his usual routine, chewing on scenery and spitting out dialogue with the rhythmic cadence of an auctioneer who has had one too many espressos, and while his presence is always welcome, he is trapped here playing a caricature of a frustrated uncle that he perfected back when Jimmy Sheirgill was still doing romantic leads in Yaar Annmulle. Upasana Singh matches his volume if not his comic timing, screaming half her lines over the din of poorly mixed background scores that sound like they were downloaded off a free royalty site in 2011. It’s a small thing but it bugged me how the Foley artist used the exact same sound effect for a wooden gate swinging open whether we were looking at a luxury farmhouse or a dilapidated toolshed on the edge of a wheat field. The camera work by the DP lacks any coherent philosophy, shifting wildly between sun-drenched drone shots that look like promotional tourism reels and tight, handheld medium close-ups that make every conversation feel like a tense hostage negotiation even when they are just discussing the price of diesel.

Directorially, Rattan seems more interested in getting to the next song sequence than in letting scenes breathe, which means emotional turning points arrive unannounced and vanish just as quickly before the next upbeat bhangra track kicks in to reset the emotional baseline to zero. This relentless pacing creates an exhausting rhythm where nobody is ever allowed to feel sad or contemplative for more than twenty seconds without a comic relief sidekick running into frame to trip over a goat. The themes of cultural displacement and the desperate obsession with moving abroad are treated with the depth of a greeting card, floating past without ever sticking to the ribs of a script that treats immigration as a punchline rather than a trauma. You can feel the ghost of a better movie buried somewhere underneath the clutter, a smaller, darker comedy about the absurdities of rural posturing that got rewritten out of existence to accommodate four different romantic duets filmed against mustard yellow fields that have been shot to death by every director with a camera and a budget since the nineties.

When the credits finally roll, there is no grand thematic synthesis to ponder and no clever narrative trick to admire, just the lingering memory of Harpal’s oversized sunglasses and a recurring audio glitch during the third reel where someone’s mobile phone clearly vibrates on a table while a dramatic confrontation is happening in the foreground. It is a messy, uneven piece of work that refuses to take itself seriously, which occasionally saves it from its own worst instincts but usually just leaves you wondering why nobody bothered to do a second take on the emotional climax.