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.
