One wedding & too many dark secrets to unload

“Har happy family ek jaisi hoti hai, lekin har unhappy family ek dusre se bilkul alag hoti hai…”

‘Love, Sitara’ opens with this piece of gyan, and before we can grasp it, we are bamboozled into witnessing an unwanted pregnancy and a cleverly choreographed marriage proposal.

A beautiful Sitara (Sobhita Dhulipala) seduces her now-on, now-off North Indian boyfriend Arjun (Rajeev Siddhartha) into submission. What follows is the unlocking of dark secrets one by one, all in the backdrop of a wedding.

Much to the annoyance of her hotelier father Govind (Sanjay Bhutani) and mother Latha (Virginia Rodrigues), Sitara, Tara for her close ones, decides to get married at their ancestral home in Kochi, which belongs to her maternal grandmother Amma (B Jayashree). This is where Tara chances upon an old photograph of her father with her maternal aunt, Hema (Sonali Kulkarni). Her investigation into the matter unearths uncomfortable truths that can break several relationships — husband-wife, mother-daughter, sister-sister, and, ultimately, Tara and Arjun. And if that’s not enough, the matriarch of the family choses this occasion to spill her beans too. Mercifully, the groom side is pretty clean, except for Rajeev — a chef, he wants to make his mark on the global culinary scene by migrating to Singapore — who has constant run-offs with his father. A tad too much to handle.

With a run time of an hour and 45 minutes and the secrets of three generations to handle, director Vandana Kataria paces up the narrative right from the word ‘go’. By the time the film exposes the victims and perpetrators, touching every shade of emotion, I find myself still grappling with the basic question: why all the secrets needed to tumble out on Sitara’s wedding?

Usually, the combination of a wedding and a dysfunctional family makes for some voyeuristic pleasure, but given a choice, I would steer clear of this one. The banters at the dinner table are so forced and suffocating, one would quietly pick up the plate and retreat.

Even the humour doesn’t work. The jokes are drab at their best and cringe-worthy at their worst. Here is a sample. Amma ties an alarm on a cow’s leg which sends out an alert to indicate that it is ready to have sex! Tara, her city friend Anjali (Tamara D’Souza) and Amma rush to record the act.

By the time Tara gathers the courage to tell her mother about Govind’s affair and Arjun about her pregnancy, and her one-night stand casting a doubt about the child’s paternity, emotional fatigue sets in. Too drained to invest in the characters who suffer, hurt and repent and heal, I try to find succour in cinematographer Szymon Lenkowski’s lush green frames and age-old customs. Only if Kataria had not put all her characters on those frames!

Except for Dhulipala, most of the characters who are supposed to be Malayali, and behave in a certain way, do not fit the bill. Some of them are ‘caricaturish’. Dhulipala delights even though she bears signs of the ‘Made in Heaven’ hangover, giving us glimpses of the Tara from the popular web-series. One actress who stands out is Sonali Kulkarni. As an ageing airhostess and habitual home-breaker, she is mean, vulnerable, ambitious and lonely, all rolled into one, and convincingly so.

After the plot takes a predictable turn, Sitara mouths the same dialogue: ‘All happy families are alike, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’This time, her line has a ring to it. Still, it does nothing to my happiness quotient.