The director who got his start in music videos under the mononym of Tarsem expanded to Tarsem Singh for his feature debut The Cell, went back to a first-name basis for sophomore effort The Fall, billed himself as Tarsem Singh Dhandwar for his next two films, Tarsem Singh for one more, and back to the full moniker for the new romance Dear Jassi. If the constant rebrands suggest a continuous grappling with his Indian identity and Tinseltown assimilation, then his impassioned if overwrought take on a true-life Romeo and Juliet adds an intriguing wrinkle to the subject.
His works of pop-opera maximalism have ventured to every corner of the globe, the limits of the slumbering imagination, into myth and fable, and he’s now blazed a path to the last place left: home, the Punjab region, where he’s stripped down his style while relegating his instinct for bigness to intensity of feeling. The swells of near-psychedelic formal grandeur have been scaled down, replaced with a human story taking its big swings (and whiffs) in terms of pathos. It would be a back-to-basics picture if its creator hadn’t begun his career with his head already in the heavens.
