Winner of the Platform Prize at Toronto last year, Dear Jassi is based on a real-life crime from 2000, when an Indian-Canadian woman in love with a lower caste farmer/bus driver back in her ancestral Punjab found herself targeted by her own family for marrying “for love” without their permission.
It marks the return of Indian-born filmmaker Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, a master of music videos who turned his visual talents to fantasy films like The Cell and The Fall, before the Ryan Reynolds’ starrer Self/less in 2015 put a brake on his career. Dear Jassi, his first film to be shot in India, takes the eclectic auteur in yet another direction as it unravels the dynamics of first love in a social context gone horribly wrong.
This sad tale, recurrent the world over wherever a progressive feminist culture collides with ancient patriarchal values, is told unemphatically, unfolding first of all as a charmingly innocent relationship that develops, at times, too slowly. Its leisurely pace allows the director to switch back and forth between the lively chaos of a corrupt but multi-colored India, where the engaging male lead Mith (Yugam Sood) scrapes by with a little help from his friends (and the unconditional love of his sharp-tongued mother, played with heroic passion by Baljinder Kaur), and the sterile-feeling Canadian strip mall where the heroine works in a beauty salon. She is strong not just because her family is relatively well-off, but in knowing that she earns her own salary and has her own bank account. All these crucial details are presented casually, leaving the audience to enjoy the burgeoning romance between Jassi and Mithu as almost a light-hearted rom com, until the promised happy ending lightness in a few deft strokes.
Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu, known as Jassi, is visiting India’s Punjab region with her Indian-Canadian family when her girlfriends take her to a game of kabaddi. This contact sport, played by local lads stripped to the waist and wearing only shorts, is an ideal intro to athletically-built Mithu, the local champion. Jassi is smitten and for Mithu, too, it is love at first sight. Their mutual attraction plays out at a natural pace, and nowhere does the class difference seem to rule out their getting closer. A precedent of sorts is the secret courtship of Jassi’s cousin by a good-looking young pharmacist who has a money-making store in the market. But when he comes calling to announce his intentions, the rifles come out. This unexpected drama of the family white-beards against a well-groomed suitor chimes the hour of the patriarchy and the no-holds-barred way it exerts its claim on the unmarried women in the family.
Yet Jassi, the squeaky clean but ballsy beautician, seems impervious to warnings and foreshadowing in Amit Rai’s subtle screenplay, based on Fabian Dawson’s book. When her ailing father dies suddenly, she comes under the control of her uncle, the same one who shot at her cousin’s fiancé. Most of all, she naively imagines her beloved mother, played as a self-absorbed hysteric by Sunita Dhir, will take her side and protect her. In the end, Jassi’s admirable courage counts for very little, while her misjudgment of the situation, sadly, counts a great deal.
The opening and closing scenes show a beautiful use of non-narrative symbolism that takes the story to a higher octave, as the well-known poet and singer Kanwar Grewal, sitting beside another musician on a green farm field, sings of the tragic love story being told. His eccentric but authoritative voice invokes God while it refutes taking traditional teachings literally (to paraphrase: “If bathing and baptism were enough to attain enlightenment, every frog and fish would be in heaven”), and its return at the end of the film gives a sense of meaning and closure.
A shout-out to Brendan Galvin’s cinematography, with its distinctive shots taken not from drones but from low-tech rooftops that reveal so much about the Sikh community, and production designer Tanisha Goswami’s deeply felt emphasis on natural locations and bright colors, particularly the sensual contrast between reds and greens.
Director, editor: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar
Screenplay: Amit Rai based on a book by Fabian Dawson
Cast: Pavia Sidhu, Yugam Sood, Gourav Sharma, Sukhwinder Chahal, Sunita Dhir, Baljinder Kaur
Producers: Rajesh Bahl, Sanjay Grover, Bhushan Kumar, Krishan Kumar
Cinematography: Brendan Galvin
Production design: Tanisha Goswami
Costume design: Komal Shahani
Music: Kanwar Grewal
Production companies: Creative Strokes Productions (India), T-Series (India), Wakaoo Films (India)
World Sales:Lichter Grossman Nichols Adler Feldman & Clark Inc. (Los Angeles)
Venue: Mediterrane Film Festival (competition)
In Punjabi, English
132 minutes
