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

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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.