Dear Jassi crept up on me. I was invited to a movie at the SB film festival without any idea what I was going to see. It starts slow, and at first it was unclear what it was or where its going. Why open in this non-descript field? Wasn't there a location without powerlines? Couldn't they have been cropped out? At the end it becomes devastatingly clear why it had to open and close at this particular spot.
And, gradually the authentic ordinary-ness of the India and Canada locations becomes more and more transfixing and transporting. It infiltrated deep in my memories, connecting its story line with my own actual travel experiences, which are much more than the curated and photoshopped highlights that my superficial memory has coalesced around.
Similarly, I was drawn deep into the young love scenes. All the acting was great. Paria Sidhu in particular excels in inducing emotion from a glance or expression. These scenes brought me right back into the feeling of my own innocent, all-encompassing loves. Then there come the miscommunications, crossed wires; the bureaucratic and familial complications ... I felt like I was reliving the strongest emotions of every relationship I ever had, as the characters' expressed emotions intersected my muscle memory of the exquisite torture of love sickness; of yearning for and finding connection...
I can't recall having such a powerful, deeply authentic emotional journey in a movie.
It was like the movie opened my heart wide...and then just plunged its message in.
I can see why the director was haunted for decades by this story, and felt he must share it. This is the kind of movie that infiltrates deep in the viewers consciousness and subconsciousness; illuminates with devastating clarity a practice so utterly unacceptable it *must* change, and in so doing creates the conditions for it to change.
