‘Dear Jassi’ Review: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar Makes a Restrained Return With a Real-Life Romeo and Juliet Tale

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic Cinema has been a little duller for the eight-year absence of Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, the Indian-born auteur whose flamboyant formal style carried over from the music video realm into a distinctively sensuous strain of mainstream fantasy filmmaking — halted by the relative disappointment of 2015’s lackluster Ryan Reynolds vehicle “Self/less.” That makes Singh Dhandwar’s return with “Dear Jassi” something of an event, even before considering the film’s surprising expansion of his repertoire: Leaving behind Hollywood, genre cinema and his trademark maximalist mise-en-scène for his first film made in his homeland, the director keeps things simple but stately in this fact-based tale of young, star-crossed love in India’s Punjab region.

The result is sometimes slack but incrementally powerful, marked by a palpable sense of renewed purpose on the part of its helmer.

Singh Dhandwar claims the true story of Jaswinder Kaur Sidhu, a young Indian-Canadian woman murdered by her own family in an honor killing in 2000, has been at the back of his mind for more or less the duration of his feature film career — and there is a bracing air of catharsis to “Dear Jassi,” an emphasis on elemental emotions and visceral violence that is new to his work.

Yet in this unfamiliarly restrained register, the filmmaker doesn’t feel entirely at home with pure human storytelling. The two characters at the center of Amit Rai’s screenplay are superficially defined beyond their all-consuming devotion, and that lack of nuance and texture makes for some flat stretches across a leisurely 134-minute runtime — though a shattering finale, staged with brilliant formalist rigor, leaves the most lasting impression.