Love Sitara review: A well-intentioned film that has its moments but gets lost in its storytelling!

Sobhita Dhulipala's Love Sitara feels too undercooked and breezy to be taken seriously as a dysfunctional family drama despite its intriguing premise of a matriarchal household featuring three generations of women.

Every family, in its own way, carries a form of dysfunction but what defines a truly dysfunctional family? Is it one that's given up on each other and comfortably retreats into self-created bubbles, or is it the family that fights, confronts hard truths, and remains entangled in messy relationships? Love Sitara attempts to explore these questions but falters with its uneven tone and casual approach, which undercuts the weight of its intentions. Leaving this, Vandana Katraia's lightweight film feels too underwhelming to engage entirely with its complex themes and promising narrative.

Inspired by the famous Leo Tolstoy line from Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," this film delves into a family rife with sister rivalry, infidelity, pre-marital pregnancy, gender stereotypes, loneliness, and the clash between individualism and familial togetherness. It begins as a love story between two ambitious modern souls—Sitara (Sobhita Dhulipala), a Mumbai-based Malayali interior designer, and Arjun Anand (Rajeev Siddhartha), a Punjabi chef with dreams of working in Singapore. The calculated yet sudden plan to marry in Sitara’s small-town Kerala home, paves the way for the love story to quickly escalate to a full-blown family drama as long-hidden secrets are revealed. Just like the entire film where all the chaos is heavily curated only to be resolved by the end!

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To call this sweet Hindi-Malayalam, one-and-a-half-hour film a bad experience would be unfair as it certainly has its moments. However, the film is more compelling in parts than as a cohesive whole. Like a deep dive into any seemingly perfect family, the cracks begin to show, and Love Sitara explores this unravelling. Set against the backdrop of a small town in Kerala, Sitara's family gathers for her wedding. However, as she stumbles upon an old album hiding long-buried secrets, the family’s facade crumbles, and so does her marriage with Arjun. The problem, though, isn’t the film’s structure—it’s the uneven pacing and muddled tonality that leaves you feeling disconnected.

The film starts abruptly, with a quick succession of events that confused me as if I had begun watching somewhere in the middle. Its constant back and forth, suddenly ramping up the drama to almost soap opera levels while maintaining its otherwise mellow pacing—mirroring the laid-back Kerala setting—creates a dissonance that makes the well-timed revelations feel less impactful. Don’t get me wrong, the film’s unpretentious, simplistic take on familial issues, not over-the-top love story, and its beautiful aesthetic rooted in culture is commendable, but the lack of cohesive narrative binding leaves a void that’s hard to overlook.

Sobhita Dhulipala, as Sitara, channels some of the realist feminist magic of Tara from Made In Heaven as she deals with her own baggage while managing her family’s trauma. But her character, like the rest of the film, is reduced to a uni-dimensional arc that doesn't leave enough space to delve deep into her rational fears. Her submissive, heartbroken mother, Latha (Virginia Rodrigues); her charming yet always pleasure-seeking father, Govind (Sanjay Bhutani); her loud, independent but lonely spinster aunt, Hema (Sonali Kulkarni); and her experienced straight-talking grandmother, all start with promise, but the film never digs deep enough for any of them. The characters’ transformations feel highly underdeveloped and disjointed, making it hard to care about their emotional journeys. Hence, performances oscillate between overly dramatic and underwhelming, leaving no effect! And Rajeev Siddhartha, as the chef-cum-fiancé, finds himself effectively sidelined, much like how female characters often are in male-centric narratives. 

Love Sitara aims to be a layered, emotional drama about a dysfunctional matriarchal family dealing with the complexities of womanhood and family among three different generations, but unfortunately, it feels too scattered, unsure of what it wants to be. It’s a shame because a film with such a premise could have been a beacon of hope for nuanced storytelling about women seeking that happy ending kinda happiness in a flawed world. Instead, it remains a peppy, breezy one-time watch at best and in 2024, we need more than this nonchalant ride into a dysfunctional family! 

Love Sitara is currently streaming on Zee5! 

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