The director who got his start in music videos under the mononym of Tarsem expanded to Tarsem Singh for his feature debut The Cell, went back to a first-name basis for sophomore effort The Fall, billed himself as Tarsem Singh Dhandwar for his next two films, Tarsem Singh for one more, and back to the full moniker for the new romance Dear Jassi. If the constant rebrands suggest a continuous grappling with his Indian identity and Tinseltown assimilation, then his impassioned if overwrought take on a true-life Romeo and Juliet adds an intriguing wrinkle to the subject.
His works of pop-opera maximalism have ventured to every corner of the globe, the limits of the slumbering imagination, into myth and fable, and he’s now blazed a path to the last place left: home, the Punjab region, where he’s stripped down his style while relegating his instinct for bigness to intensity of feeling. The swells of near-psychedelic formal grandeur have been scaled down, replaced with a human story taking its big swings (and whiffs) in terms of pathos. It would be a back-to-basics picture if its creator hadn’t begun his career with his head already in the heavens.
A pair of troubadours bookend these two hours with an invocation that frames the modern tragedy in between as legend, a love to reverberate through time. That’s it for the metaphysical, the ensuing conflicts shaped instead by earthbound politics and economics, as well as the grim details of a case file from the 90s. Born and raised in Canada – a partial setting providing a local hook for the premiere at the Toronto film festival – the fair Jassi (Pavia Sidhu) travels to Punjabi country for a stay with her cousin’s family in their palatial home topped by a huge ceramic Air Canada jet. It’s not long before she’s making googly eyes at the literal boy nextdoor, the strapping Mithu (Yugam Sood). But because he makes a living as a lowly rickshaw driver when he’s not setting records in a high-impact form of tag called kabaddi, Jassi’s family strictly forbids their union in spite of the suitor’s pure heart. Anyone with moderate schooling in the literary classics knows what comes next: a furtive courtship, a secret marriage, a miscommunication that leads to grave misunderstanding.
Like so many high school theater iconoclasts before him, Tarsem differentiates his iteration of Shakespeare’s dog-eared narrative through context, in this instance the byzantine Kafka nightmare of immigration. On top of the animosity from Jassi’s parents, border control agents conspire to keep our lovers apart after Jassi is sent back to the Great White North, separating them with a wall of documents, deadlines and fees. At every stage, a brutal khaki-clad police force can and must be bribed to forge papers, look the other way or do just about anything else. The emotional peaks rise not from the main couple’s ardor, but from the extraordinary fortitude and determination that the simple act of moving from one country to another demands of ordinary citizens. Forced to navigate an intentionally discouraging institution with minimal guidance, a brazenly unjust series of hurdles designed to devalue and restrict life itself, Mithu hits more poignant notes in his fight for the freedom of mobility than in his quest for his beloved.
These crazy kids put everything on the line for an immediately all-consuming mutual infatuation, though at times, it’s difficult to discern what they see in one another; comely as she may be, she’s also short-tempered and impatient, while he’s got a bad habit of drinking and dialing. Even chalking this up to the flaws of mere mortals, and keeping in mind that perfectly rational people look past a lot more all the time, the passages meant to demonstrate their chemistry don’t explode with the interpersonal pyrotechnics Tarsem once expressed as visual spectacle. There’s no wit in their shy rapport, and no itchy current of desire riling the pent-up virgins, the lukewarm temperature perhaps a consequence of the Indian film board’s mandated chasteness. On the upside, this also has the benefit of adding considerable heft to the scant dashes of rawness, such as a postcoital bloodstain discovered the morning after their elided consummation.
And yet that contrast reaches a jarring extreme in the cold-blooded final act, which drastically transforms this honeyed-if-fraught entanglement between star-crossed paramours into something out of a sadistic Euro arthouse piece. Tarsem relays the horrifying facts of this incident in such a way that telegraphs a desire for tasteful delicacy and discretion – he says so in the press notes – while nonetheless veering off course into the scandalously stomach-turning. He hasn’t let go of his impulse toward cinematic effect for its own sake, just transmuted it into an outsized sentimentality with far more delicate real-world stakes. The violent disruption of a fantasy too pure to be realized certainly leaves an impact, just without due consideration as to how much is too much.
This was once a virtue in Tarsem’s work, empowering him to push his lush surrealism to delirious highs. The heart has a breaking point, however, and reaching it doesn’t even require that much skill – quite the opposite, in fact. Having set out to shock and ultimately shatter his audience, a film-maker unwilling or incapable of hitting the tonal brakes succeeds in his mission, only to compromise a deeper dramatic power along the way.
Dear Jassi is screening at the Toronto film festival with a release date to be announced
