‘Pricey Jassi’ Assessment: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar Delivers a Devastating Star-Crossed Romance

Simplicity serves director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar properly. The India-born filmmaker, whose resumé consists of landmark music movies for the likes of R.E.M. and Deep Forest, has tended towards the stylistically baroque in such movies as The Cell, The Fall, Immortals, Mirror Mirror and Self/much less. Now, along with his first characteristic in eight years, he has returned to the nation of his delivery and made his easiest and strongest effort so far. Receiving its world premiere on the Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant, Pricey Jassi has the texture of a timeless folktale, made all of the extra unbearably unhappy due to its foundation actually.

That feeling is strengthened by the movie’s framing system, wherein famend Punjabi singer/composer Kanwar Grewal introduces and narrates the story, his music giving it the texture of one thing that has been handed down for generations. In actuality, the tragic story that impressed the movie started within the Nineties — when the movie, a lot of which options Punjabi dialogue with subtitles, is about as properly.

The younger protagonists are 19-year-old Jassi (Pavia Sidhu), a rich Indian woman whose household has relocated from Punjab, India, to Canada, and Mithu (Yugam Sood), a good-looking however poor rickshaw driver whom she meets whereas again in India visiting her family. It’s love at first sight, with Jassi turning into enthralled by Mithu when she first sees him enjoying an area sport. Regardless of their very completely different social and monetary positions, the 2 can’t take their eyes off one another, at first solely exchanging silent stares earlier than a tentative courtship begins. It isn’t lengthy till Jassi declares, “I need to keep right here eternally.”

Alas, it’s not meant to be, as she’s compelled to return house to Canada, the place she sends Mithu a collection of letters, which he enlists the assistance of an area schoolteacher to learn to him. The trainer, embarrassed by the outpourings of fervent love expressed within the missives, turns round whereas he reads them so he and Mithu don’t have to have a look at one another.

Secretly taking cash from her household, Jassi sends Mithu the funds to acquire a passport and a airplane ticket to Canada to go to her. However he falls sufferer to crooked journey brokers and loses the cash. She returns for one more go to as an alternative, and has Jassi procure sleeping drugs with which she secretly medicine her family so he can go to her whereas they’re knocked out. However she quickly turns into very conscious of the hazards of their relationship when her uncle shoots and wounds her cousin’s potential suitor and the household compound turns into closely fortified.

The 2 secretly get married, however issues go from dangerous to worse when Jassi’s father suffers a deadly coronary heart assault and her mom finds out in regards to the relationship. Mithu is arrested and accused of rape, and it’s solely the start of a collection of calamities that finish in tragedy.

Based mostly on the reporting of Canadian journalist Fabian Dawson, the screenplay by Amit Rai well focuses primarily on the 2 younger central figures, with lots of the adults depicted as violent, abusive or hysterical. The story would appear unbelievable have been it not true, and for the truth that many comparable occasions have been reported all over the world. Using a much more classical filmmaking fashion than beforehand, Dhandwar relates it with hanging visible simplicity, if at occasions indulgently by way of too-leisurely pacing and a few repetitiveness.

Nonetheless, the principle characters are totally plausible of their heightened emotional states, coming throughout like a modern-day Romeo and Juliet of their star-crossed romance (a sleeping potion even figures prominently within the storyline). The comparatively unknown lead actors — that is Sood’s performing debut, whereas Sidhu has appeared in such TV collection as The Flash and Merciless Summer time — ship compelling performances that hold us totally immersed in Jassi and Mithu’s insular lovestruck world marked by a naiveté that turns into their undoing. The violent climactic sequences, fantastically staged by the filmmaker, will depart you shaken.