Love, Sitara opens with a Kerala wedding, with Sobhita Dhulipala's Tara in the middle of an unabashed introduction to her dysfunctional family. Outwardly portraying a delusionally happy picture of an ideal bunch, Tara's family has perfected the art of casually masking the truth. It is a typical toxic Indian family that runs on hypocrisy and harbours several hushed secrets, enough to tear it apart.
Tara isn't exactly leading a perfect sticking-to-the-plan life herself, though. In the second scene itself we find her panicking in a clinic after finding out that she is pregnant, appalled at the discovery that contraception works only 95 percent of the time. Flooded with emotions, she makes an impromptu marriage proposal to her chef boyfriend, Arjun (Rajeev Siddhartha), with whom she shares a turbulent romantic history – conveniently hiding the truth about her pregnancy. The couple decides to have their wedding at Tara's childhood home in Kerala the same month. Thus begins a complicated circus of secrets, sleuthing, and moulding truths.
The flawed romance here isn't just restricted to the lead pair. Every romantic relationship in the film is flawed. The house helps are wedded off to drunkards and favourite aunts are wrapped in illicit affairs with married men. The film presents a disturbing array of inappropriate couples, laying bare the sad reality of a lot of Indian marriages.
Love, Sitara is a satirical mockery of romantic relationships. It exposes the faults straightaway, without beating around the bush much. The film excels in exposing the hypocrisy that pervades society, where people publicly condemn others for the very same secrets they hide themselves. With unflinching honesty, Love, Sitara reveals the flaws and double standards that often underline our most intimate connections.
What I particularly liked was director Vandana Kataria's attempt at a balanced portrayal of traditionalism and modernity. It is one of the few recent films where the two co-exist and point out the very awkwardness of this paradoxical existence. It doesn't justify the modern hookup culture but questions the traditional marriage set up, as well. The film also steers clear from a stereotypical representation of Malayali households in North Indian cinema, where you see homes reduced to extended temples with rooms.
As for performances, Dhulipala has done a decent job at portraying a flawed, messed up, and selfish woman who cannot get her priorities straight. Tara isn't written in a way that'll move you or make you feel sorry for her and her self-invited troubles, but is a nice break from the stereotypical extremes of women represented on screen. You won't feel much sympathy for her, but that's perhaps the whole point.
Siddhartha and Virginia Rodrigues, however, give the best performances of them all. The two actors bring a calming presence to the otherwise chaotic lives around them. Their poise, as opposed to the hypocrites around them, is enjoyable and delightful. Siddhartha's cooking sequences are cathartic, and Rodrigues' composure in how she handles things is a highlight. Even though the screenplay doesn't offer much room to the two for a multi-layered performance, they shine in their roles.
Love, Sitara intends well and starts strong, but somewhat lacks in its overall execution. The themes of hypocrisy, facade, and infidelity are all touched upon, but the film skirts around the impact these might have on characters and story. Though there are a few powerful scenes, including the one where Rodrigues' character has a nervous breakdown after a disturbing revelation, the momentum keeps ebbing away over time.
The dining table conversations are particularly hard to watch. The laughter feels forced and jokes miss the landing. They feel more like the early morning sessions of laughter yoga than a usual family dinner. Even though the film banks on families' pretentiousness, these fake bursts of laughter become too much to take.
Love, Sitara has all the ingredients of a good film on paper, with a perfect flavour of the traditional and the modern and how both remain deeply flawed, but it lacks a finishing touch. It ends up feeling like a good first draft for a film, which has the potential of translating into to something more challenging and complex, but is released in a rush with its half-cooked ideas, instead. The film conveniently skips on how ugly infidelity can get. While I understand that Kataria might have wanted to keep the film from being too heavy or seeming like moral lesson on monogamy, the narrative nevertheless could have been more compelling if it reckoned with the realities of the relationship issues it brings up.
Some of the tropes seem ill-fitted and act as unnecessary fillers for the storyline, scattered across the film for decorative purposes. For instance, Arjun's dad, a retired military officer, is little more than prop, who was added to the film just as another example of a dysfunctional relationship. He is there just to scorn, give disappointed looks to his son, and wear a pretentious badge of superiority. The film could have, honestly, done well without him, or at least given him a few more meaningful scenes to justify his presence.
Contrarily, some of the character tropes were wonderful in their little presence but heavily underutilized. B Jayashree, for instance, plays Tara's savage grandmother. She is unapologetically herself, loves scanning though newspapers for funny obituaries, and knows when to put her foot down. Jayashree is a joy to watch in each of her scenes. However, even though her character seems important at first, she soon takes a backseat unexpectedly; as if the director forgot about her.
Despite its shortcomings, however, Love, Sitara is a decent take on familial dysfunction in Indian families, that effectively contrasts old-school and modern relationships, while never favouring one over the other. It's a film that shows a mirror to the hypocritical standards of society, which bemoans the unstable, relationship-hopping culture of young people, and yet has been conveniently accommodating inappropriate relationships, if kept a secret. It exposes how the lustful fallacies plaguing humans have been well veneered beneath the mask of idealism.
If only the film didn't shy away from taking on its subject matter with a little more grit, it would have likely made it to the year's favourites list of a lot of cinephiles, including me. Sadly, that's not the case. While Love, Sitara might not be as good as it could have been, it is an honest attempt at portraying the evolving dimensions of love and relationships, even if it doesn't scratch beneath the surface.
Rating: 6/10
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