Love, Sitara Is A Cuddlesome Ode To That Overactive Beast Known As Dysfunctional Family
Love, Sitara stars Sobhita Dhulipala, Rajeev Siddhartha, Sonali Kulkarni among others, here's our detailed review!
At one point in Vandana Kataria’s sophomore directorial Love, Sitara , the protagonist Sitara(Sobhita Dhulipala) tells her beleaguered fiancé, “You better rethink about marrying me. Hamara family bahot zyada dysfunctional hai.” Bahot zyada dysfunctional is like saying, bahot zyada functional. There is no quantitative measure for happiness/unhappiness. Quoting Leo Tolstoy—“All happy families are the same, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way”—Sitara sets the elusively mood of joy and melancholy at a tonally exhausting pitch in this well-intended if a tad selfimportant family drama set in Kerala and featuring actors who seem authentic in their cultural placement, if somewhat displaced in their emotional predilection.
Director Vandana Kartaria’s first film Noblemen was a grim and shocking reminder of the depravity and intolerance that often underlines the well-aligned smooth operation of elitist educational institutions. This time in Love,Sitara she is on less slippery ground. This sort of a emotionally evicted family trying to seek an anchor late in their lives, is not a tough directorial task.
But it isn’t easy either, unless you have the right cast. Ms Kataria has the right faces. The culturally correct postures . But the actors and the Kerala location do not have the ingrained authenticity of Manoraganthal, the Kerala-based series coincidentally also on the same digital platform Zee5.
Although Love, Sitara lacks the emotional density of several other Kerala-based film on dysfunctional families, it gets by on the strength of a swig and sparkle. As is the wont in matriarchal films, the women are much stronger , sometimes too much so. And except for Sitara’s fiancé Arjun(played with restrain and dignity by Rajeev Siddhartha) the men come across as sketchy (offsetting the women who are often screechy) .
I for one wanted to know more about Majeed(Rijul Ray) the village do-gooder who has the urge to be anywhere and everywhere where he is needed in a crisis, and even when he is not needed.Majid is one of the characters we come close to getting close to. But somehow the director chooses to keep us distanced from the characters which could have been an advantage if the screenplay had allowed some of the more prominent characters to grow.
Among the gallery of women, the grandmother played by B Jayshree is borderline caricatural. Sonali Kulkarni stands out as Latha the black sheep of the chaotic family. Even when her character’s scenes get wobbly(for instance when her affair with her sister’s husband is exposed) Sonali takes care to make sure her character doesn’t trip over.
Love, Sitara is by no yardstick a bad film. On the contrary it is perky and it bubbles over with an emphatic ebullience, some of it misplaced. There is plenty here to like, though.The Kerala household is captured in postures of sunniness to offset the protagonist’s chronic sullenness. The screenwriting needed more brio in the confrontational scenes. But the dialogues are credible and sometimes very funny.
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