Love, Sitara review: At one hour, forty five-minute film, Love, Sitara unfolds like a school skit, The acting performances of almost the entire cast (with the bare exception of Rodrigues) is subpar at best, inadequate at worst. At no point do you feel emotionally invested in characters.
Love, Sitara Movie Review
Good intentions don’t always translate to good cinema. Love, Sitara doesn’t manage to accomplish what it intended to—that is, a portrait of a dysfunctional family which keeps secrets hidden until one day, a cycle breaker decides to break the generational curse and forces family members to accept some uncomfortable truths, The premise and the plot are nearly perfect on paper but the execution misses the mark by a mile.
Shobhita Dhulipala plays Sitara, an ambitious, career-oriented woman who is an interior designer by profession. She is vehemently opposed to the idea of marriage until one day, she finds out that she is pregnant. Much to the surprise of her friend Anjali (played by an underwhelming Tamara D’Souza), Tara proposes marriage to her on-again, off-again boyfriend Arjun (Rajeev Sidharttha), a chef who wants to open his restaurant in Singapore because, well, it is the culinary capital of the world.
Love, Sitara Movie: Plot
The marriage proposal is accepted. The venue is the ancestral home of Sitara, which belongs to her grandmother Amma (Bjayashree). Also a part of this complicated dynamic is Sitara’s father Govind (Sanjay Bhutani), a hotelier whose womanizing ways get the best of him. His wife, Sitara’s mother, Lata (Virginia Rodrigues) is unaware of her husband’s antics. This is until Sitara discovers an old photograph of her father with her mother’s sister, Hema chichi (Sonali Kulkarni).
Sitara and Arjun follow Govind and Hema, only to discover that their hunch isn’t wrong entirely—the two are having an extra-marital affair. Sitara faces the difficult choice to reveal the truth to her mother, which eventually breaks her heart. A sibling rivalry plays out in a dramatic fashion—unlike most shows where this rivalry is limited to teenage years, Love, Sitara shows two middle-aged women exchanging harsh words.
Love, Sitara Movie: Performances
In a surprising turn of events, it is revealed that Sitara is not pregnant with Arjun’s child but that of pilot Arvind (Ikhlaque Khan). Will Arjun accept Sitara’s child? Frankly, I couldn’t care less. At one hour, forty five-minute film, Love, Sitara unfolds like a school skit, The acting performances of almost the entire cast (with the bare exception of Rodrigues) is subpar at best, inadequate at worst, None of the scenes land. In fact, the dinner table conversation between Arjun and Sitara’s family seems like they are straight out of an amateur acting class.
Love, Sitara Movie: Writing And Direction
To make matters worse, the film’s humour is broken. Some of the jokes and gags are so bad, they are good. Think Amumma tying an alarm of a cow’s leg which sends out an alert, indicating that the cow is ovulating and ready to have sex. So of course Sitara, Anjali, and Amumma proceed to record the bull and the cow having sex, with Amumma questioning the bull’s sexual prowess.
The film comes off as cringeworthy, much less humorous. In fact, the whole bit where Arjun and Tara play detectives falls flat. Besides this, it won’t be wrong to say that the gaze of the film, especially towards the South Indians is problematic as evident from a scene where a Mallu man creates a scene when he is drunk, as Sitara’s family watches it and laughs, or when a bunch of locals queue up outside Amumma’s house during Sitara’s wedding ceremonies.
Love, Sitara Movie: What Works, What Doesn’t
What also doesn’t work for the film is that the dramatic moments don’t seem dramatic for some reason. Besides the subpar acting performances, the dialogues are too telenovela-esque. Expecting nuance seems unfair. At no point do you feel emotionally invested in characters. Frankly, the film was a chore to get through and I was wondering if I would even watch it in its entirety if it wasn’t my job because I couldn’t care less about the characters. In one word, Love, Sitara is exactly what Anjali said when she found out Tara is going to get married—’Cancel it’.
Star rating: 2 / 5 stars
Love, Sitara is now streaming on Zee5.
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