Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been adapted too many times to count — including by the Bollywood gangland musical Ram-Leela — but few filmmakers have sought to adapt real-world events to its storytelling structure.

Enter Tarsem Singh Dhandwar (who’s been credited during his Hollywood career as both “Tarsem” and “Tarsem Singh”), the director of Immortals and The Fall. It seems, at first, like his penchant for dazzling, poetic splendor would be an awkward fit for a real-life romantic drama that demands a certain naturalism. But Dear Jassi is a film in which Dhandwar simultaneously reins in his visual flourishes, while maintaining careful control of his meticulous formalism. The result is one of the most exhilarating and gut-wrenching movies of the year.

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Dhandwar’s first film in eight years is also his first set in his native India. Written by Amit Rai, Dear Jassi is based on the journalism of Fabian Dawson, who was responsible for chronicling the true case of forbidden love that informs the movie. It follows Indo-Canadian twenty-something beautician Jaswinder "Jassi" Sidhu (Pavia Sidhu), who falls for a poor rickshaw driver, Sukhwinder "Mithu" Singh (Yugam Sood), against her wealthy family's wishes in their hometown in Punjab.

Set in the mid-to-late '90s, the film departs from Dhandwar’s usual fairytale settings and features a distinct sense of time and place, which informs the characters and their effervescent romance in equal measure, as they charge headfirst toward inevitable tragedy.

How Dear Jassi adapts Romeo and Juliet

Credit: T-series / Wakaoo Films LLP / Creative Strokes Group

Dear Jassi walks a fine line between reality and fictionalization. The events it presents all largely happened, but by rearranging and re-staging them in the vein of Shakespeare's most well-known and widely-referenced work, Dhandwar offers a broad commentary on the nature of tragedy itself, a tenet of all human cultures, so repetitive and all-permeating that even reality can be made to retro-fit its structure. More specifically, romantic tragedies, in which young lovers are torn apart, are so familiar and well-worn that such events repeating themselves is a tragedy of its own. We refuse to learn from both our real and fictitious pasts.

After opening in medias res, with a peek at a bruised and battered Jassi fleeing her joint family home in Canada, the film peers into the past using Punjabi folk singer Kanwar Grewal as our narrative guide — Dear Jassi's equivalent of Romeo and Juliet’s anonymous narrator, who observes and comments on events from a seemingly omniscient vantage. Grewal, aware of how the story ends, prepares us for a tale of love and loss while citing the need for poetic license, before the film flashes back to 1996 where the Canadian-born Jassi visits her cousins in their village and first lays eyes on the broad-shouldered, boyish Mithu — whose nickname roughly translates to "sweetie."

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Jassi and Mithu's romance is told, at first, through silent gazes filled with lustful desire, adolescent awkwardness around Jassi's broken, Canadian-accented Punjabi and Mithu’s broken English, as well as playful teasing from their cousins and friends. It’s youthful, and innocent. In the film, the characters’ ages are left ambiguous, allowing actors Sidhu and Sood to tap into Romeo and Juliet’s teenage naivete, scaling walls and stealing glances at each other despite the disapproval of Jassi's strict, conservative Sikh family, who run a farming business in Canada. Mithu comes from a Sikh family too, though owing to India's sectarian violence and targeting of Sikhs in the 1980s, he no longer bears the traditional long-haired and turbaned Sikh appearance; even from a distance, he might be considered an outcast by the Sidhus.

The major difference between Dear Jassi and Romeo and Juliet is that while the latter was a tale of warring factions, Dhandwar’s film is about one powerful family, their perceived honor, and their assumed disapproval of a poor outsider. There's no rival to Sidhus; to them, Mithu is simply invisible, and the idea of Jassi convincing them of her romance at any point verges on pure fantasy. In this way, Dhandwar’s use of Shakespeare’s famous balcony scene also absorbs the story’s existing class subtext; that Jassi stands above Mithu is no longer just a matter of logistics or longing, but a symbol for just how far out of reach she may be.

Credit: T-series / Wakaoo Films LLP / Creative Strokes Group

While the story’s broad-strokes are molded to fit Shakespeare, the closest Indian equivalent is perhaps Nagraj Manjule’s 2016 movie Sairat, a Marathi-language modern classic about an inter-caste elopement and the ensuing violence it leads to. Dear Jassi is also rural tale of love colliding with patriarchal cultural norms and rigid social strata, and their structural and narrative similarities are difficult to ignore. This is not to say that Dear Jassi is knockoff, but rather, it’s a sister film of sorts, about similar devastating events separated by language and cultures, which both fall under the broad Indian umbrella.

However, the one way Dear Jassi departs from both Sairat and Romeo and Juliet is that for much of its runtime, its romantic leads are oceans apart.

Dear Jassi captures a long-distance relationship across borders

When Jassi and Mithu appear on screen together, the actors — who are in their twenties — share an adolescent chemistry, sporting withheld smiles that light up the screen while indicating an ill-advised desire to hit fast-forward on their relationship. The high of their first love, however, gives way to a painful hangover when Jassi returns to Canada, with the question of their future hanging in the balance. She wants Mithu to immigrate with her, but has neither money nor a passport, and there are only so many reasons she can concoct for an India visit. All Mithu can do, given their separation by 10 time zones, is wait by a payphone at odd hours of the night, in the hopes that Jassi might steal a moment to call while at her beauty salon job.

The alternative, they find, is to write letters, a process that comes with its own complications. Jassi can speak Punjabi, but can only write it out in an English script (that too, with the help of a Punjabi coworker), and Mithu can’t read or write at all, so has no choice but to enlist the help of an old teacher who takes pity on him, leading to exchanges and emotional negotiations between the two that are funny and bittersweet. However, once the couple settles into a letter-writing rhythm, Dhandwar (who also edited the film) avoids depicting this complicated, multi-step process of communication each time, as it transforms Dear Jassi into an alluring epistolary.

Credit: T-series / Wakaoo Films LLP / Creative Strokes Group

For the most part, Dhandwar and cinematographer Brendan Galvin capture characters in relation to their surroundings, using wide lenses and deep focus to ensure the constant, looming sense that each of them is a product of their environment. However, wide lenses also have the uncanny ability to exaggerate lateral movement. So, when Jassi and Mithu begin reading each other’s letters — which we hear in the form of their voiceovers, ripped from their narrations to their respective transcribers, and perhaps imagined by each person in the other’s voice — the camera begins to pan on its axis, around and around, like the hands of a clock. Montages spanning entire months, of Jassi and Mithu with their friends and family, take on this dizzying form, collapsing time into a continuum of intimate secrets shared only by the two of them, no matter who else they’re around.

Like any relationship, Jassi and Mithu’s honeymoon phase doesn’t last, and reality eventually sets in. Complications, both familial and legal, begin to pile up, and the prospect of the young couple being united across borders grows increasingly grim, despite their best efforts. This frustrates them both and imbues their brief conversations with the misguided animosity that can accompany young romance, often as a defense mechanism against unexpected bumps in the road. These instincts only grow more fragile as the months and years go by — something Sairat keenly understood about young love as well — and by the time Jassi and Mithu finally have some version of the love they want, it can’t help but feel weighed down.

Tarsem Singh Dhandwar's style is more focused and mature

Most directors would fade between images in order to depict the passage of time, and the way Dhandwar matches his fades in other films is practically iconic. However, it’s a signature he mostly discards while shooting and editing Dear Jassi. While the transition works in his visual fairytales, he maintains a sense of reverence for the real story, despite its Shakespearean framing.

The star-crossed couple may have their heads in the clouds, but reality is always just around the corner, waiting to drag them back to Earth — sometimes, in moments of shocking violence that break the movie's rhythmic editing and jolt the audience to attention. Dhandwar and Galvin tend to employ cool, calculated medium shots either head-on or in profile, often maintaining an observational distance from events (even as the camera pans and tracks across space, imbuing the environment with life and energy) though they also know exactly when to break with this pattern too. Sidhu and Sood are both newcomers to the big screen, and they have raw, barely-containable emotional energies that haven’t yet been reined in by directions towards subtlety. So, the camera captures their most operatic moments in close up, creating vulnerable and explosive portraits that stand in for the complex patterns and cross-fades Dhandwar usually employs.

The shapes he finds most interesting this time are Sidhu’s round face, and Sood’s square shoulders, and every shape their bodies take when they’re in each other’s vicinity — close by, but not yet touching, as they learn to navigate the very idea of romance in the first place. It’s what helps make young love feel so intoxicating in Dear Jassi, and in turn, it paves the way for the stunning and horrifying turns the story eventually takes.

Dear Jassi was reviewed out its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival; the movie will open worldwide at a date TBC.