‘Dear Jassi’: Toronto Review

Dir: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar. India. 2023. 132mins

A narrator advises viewers at the beginning of Dear Jassi that they are about to watch a tragic love story. It is a warning worth heeding: based on actual events, this despairing tale of a young couple who suffered dire consequences for their star-crossed romance builds to a disturbing finale. Making his first film in his native India — and his first feature in eight years — director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar tones down the visual flourishes of his past work, but while the story he tells is powerful, its telling is decidedly less so. In their big-screen debut, Pavia Sidhu and Yugam Sood are likeable as the doomed couple whose families are from different classes of Punjabi society, a tension these idealistic lovers cannot hope to resolve. 

At 134 minutes, it struggles to maintain dramatic momentum

Screening in Toronto’s Platform section, Dear Jassi could attract international audiences with its Romeo And Juliet-style melodrama, with Singh Dhandwar underlining the similarities between this true story and Shakespeare’s classic play. Sympathetic reviews should help boost visibility,  and certainly its win in Toronto’s only competitive section, Platform, will help spark further interest.

The attraction between Jassi (Sidhu) and Mithu (Sood) is immediate. Travelling to Jagraon to visit her well-to-do family, Jassi encounters this charming local rickshaw driver, a romance quickly sparking. But when Jassi returns to her Canadian homeland, she realises how difficult it will be to maintain this love affair since her family will not approve of her dating someone from a lower economic class. 

Singh Dhandwar, whose last feature was 2015’s Self/less, constructs Dear Jassi like a folktale, with Punjabi singer Kanwar Grewal playing an on-screen narrator who bookends the narrative. The director of fantastical films such as The Fall and Immortals here focuses on stark realism, although his regular cinematographer Brendan Galvin emphasises the natural beauty of the Indian locales, presenting a deceptively inviting world. Sadly, Jassi and Mithu will learn the truth of a culture that contains uglier traits underneath the gorgeous surface.

Theatre and television actor Sidhu plays the title character as a happy, outgoing person possessing none of the elitism exhibited by her relatives. Dear Jassi doesn’t deeply develop its main characters — both Jassi and Mithu are somewhat ciphers, symbols of true love rather than fully dimensional human beings — but her ebullience compensates. Likewise, Sood, who has not acted professionally before, turns his inexperience into an asset, portraying Mithu as an unbridled young man who believes he has found his purpose when this woman walks into his life. But the characters’ naivety will sometimes hamper them, with immature misunderstandings on both sides additionally imperilling their love affair. 

Those obstacles are nothing, nowever, when compared to Jassi’s family’s anger at discovering she is romancing a peasant. After learning what happeed to a cousin who wishes to marry someone below her station, Jassi recognises that her and Mithu’s courtship will never be permitted. Even so, the lengths to which her elders will go to keep them from being together are shocking, ultimately leading to unimaginable violence.

Singh Dhandwar fashions lovely moments when this pair’s relationship first blossoms. Especially satisfying is the contrast between the homes where Jassi’s and Mithu’s families reside: hers is taller, and so when he stands on his rooftop to look up at her on her rooftop, it’s a clever visual allusion to Romeo And Juliet’s famous balcony scene. But like Shakespeare, Dear Jassi is heading toward heartbreak, with the filmmaker delivering the brutal final scenes without sensationalism.

Nonetheless the picture, which runs to 134 minutes, struggles to maintain its dramatic momentum. The love story fails to completely captivate, and the examination of this classist, regressive society too easily becomes repetitive rather than proving insightful or damning. The fate awaiting Jassi and Mithu is so terrible that there is no questioning why Singh Dhandwar has wanted to make this film for nearly 30 years. But his fury only rarely translates to impassioned cinema — your heart breaks for the real-life couple, less for the lovebirds who represent them on screen.