‘Dear Jassi’ Review: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s Tender Story Of Star-Crossed Lovers Lands A Killer Blow – London Film Festival

Damon Wise
·5 min read
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Dear Jassi arrives with echoes of Madonna’s 1989 hit “Dear Jessie” and its sugary promise of pink elephants and lemonade, but none of that turns out to be forthcoming in Tarsem Singh Dhandwar’s beautiful and brutal sixth feature. Instead, we have perhaps the most disturbing bait-and-switch since George Sluizer’s original iteration of The Vanishing, a Punjabi Juliet-meets-Romeo story that’s much harsher that any so-far-filmed version of West Side Story and a whole lot funnier. This dissonance takes a while to reveal itself, but when it does, the shock is visceral. The fact that almost everything is true is the killer blow, and the shockwave of that reverberates through the poignant final credits, a static shot that forces the audience, or maybe just simply dares them, to think about what they’ve just seen.

Immigrant stories have been big in 2023, but the troubling core of Dear Jassi is actually an emigrant story, one that directly deals with the lesser-publicized socio-economic downside of migration. This isn’t some highfalutin academic exercise but a refreshing reflection of some of the realities, like the way people can leave their homelands and then, when safely in pastures greener, start to look down on the world they left behind. Lensed by regular collaborator Brendan Galvin, Dear Jassi is that rare culture-clash film that emphasizes similarities rather than the differences, to the extent that the presence of a cow is the best way to check you’re definitely in India.

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The beginning is weirdly low-key for Singh, who made a splash with his 2000 debut The Cell, a serial-killer movie starring Jennifer Lopez as a shrink who can enter coma patients’ minds that — can you believe it? — was accused of being a bit far-fetched. In an anonymous field, a singer-slash-musician uses the words of 18th-century Sufi poet Bulleh Shah to set the scene. “They say love makes people crazy,” he says, before the camera unexpectedly swipes right to a seemingly innocuous farm building. Love does, of course, do this, but the people made crazy in this story are not the lovers but those around them, and what happens over the next two hours is both a subtle and effective elaboration on Shakespeare’s tale of two households and something that will later lead us back to that farm building and reveal it in a macabre new light.

In this case, the two households span two continents. Sometime in the mid-90s, Canadian Indian girl Jassi (Pavia Sidhu) is visiting her cousin Charni in rural India when she lays eyes on Mithu (Yugam Sood), a village boy who excels at kabaddi, a rowdy local contact sport. For reasons that are never quite clear, Jassi becomes obsessed with Mithu, an obsession that raises red flags from the beginning. Equally unclear is the chronology; initially, Singh plays to and fro with time, showing Jassi at her home in Canada, where the police have been called to escort her from the family home. Tensions are running high. A woman’s voice shouts, “Bitch, you’re dead!”

How did we get here? Singh’s film fills in that backstory with warmth and humor as Jassi and Mithu pursue a very chaste courtship; Jassi goes home and does everything she can to get Mithu over to Canada. Mithu, of course, has no clue how to get there. He has no passport, and even when he gets one, his attempt to book a flight is thwarted when a rip-off travel agent steals his fee (whenever we’re in India, allusions to corruption and bribery are never far away). Nevertheless, Jassi persists, much to the dismay of her snobbish ex-pat mother, whose husband is gravely ill and whose determination to hold on to her sense of family, class and reputation turns out to be way scarier than any of the — mostly offscreen — physical violence, most of which ensues when Jassi demonstrates her love for Mithu (“If I’d known you were going to do this,” says her mother later, “I would have killed you at birth”).

It’s a bold melange, and if this film had emerged in the ’70s, chances are that Dear Jassi would have test-screened once or twice and then been hurriedly edited down to a weird 80 minutes based on the jokey stuff, like Italian director Fernando Di Leo’s controversial 1978 curio To Be Twenty. Happily, that’s unlikely to happen here, especially with a director who likes to take literal ownership of his films. But even though the likes of Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé have done some of the legwork in this area, Singh’s film is still challenging, since it comes with a lightness that’s not much known in the cinema of transgression – there are lots of laughs until, with nigh on 45 minutes still to go, the film radically changes gear and then, most disturbing of all, doubles back on itself with a seriously upsetting reveal.

Admirers of Singh’s 2006 delirious cult classic The Fall might be, at least initially, thrown by the relative ordinariness of Dear Jassi (and, compared to The Fall, almost anything seems ordinary). But like that film, Dear Jassi is working on a meta level, subverting a classic storyline — in that case, it was a hero’s journey; in this case, it’s two illicit lovers’ flight — to create a powerful and provocative film about family, pride and tribalism. You may yawn and point out that Shakespeare said pretty much all that in the 16th century, but the fact that the events referenced here happened less than 30 years ago is a sobering reminder of how Romeo and Juliet‘s senseless loss of lives has been fetishized into a romantic trope, and that any so-called “tragic” love affair comes with so much more collateral damage than we may ever know.

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