Sairat Review
I would like to provide a rather contriversal opinion: Sairat is the best romance that India has to offer (obviously dethroning Veer-Zara). Other films may be cozier or grander (or have SRK in them), but I have found that no other movie makes me think about it as much as Sairat.
Avove everything else, it is one of the most viscerally emotional films I think I have ever watched.
The acting is wonderfully earnest, and you really get the feel of small town India throughout the first half.
Nagraj Manjule is brillant at using the audience's expectations against them, and weaves a beautiful love story throughout the film.
It echoes Alaipayuthey/Saathiya greatly in various places, but I found it to be a much more focused, cohesive movie that reflected the recklessness of young love much better, not to mention its message on caste.
The cinematographyis gritty and very well done, which helps set up audience expectations of it being like any other forbidden romance film.
The ending of the film often gets the most discussion, and it is because, like no other indian film I know of, it plays with the things we as an audience have come to expect from a film like this. The harsh reality of what has happened (especially viewed through the eyes of their child) is sudden, yes, but something that we would have expected if we were looking at the film's plot in the context of reality. Which most people do not.
Coupling this with the references to 'life not being like a movie' peppered throughout the film, Sairat, as much as it is a comment directly on the destructive nature of the caste system, is about how indians engage with the art they experience, particularly cinema, and whether we take any of the messages we learn from it and ever actually apply them to society in real life (or even consider that they have messages to begin with), or whether they are simply lost when, because films are largely viewed as escapism, we leave the cinema and we forget.
In romance as a genre, I feel we see what society expects love to be reflected back to us in an (often) rather comfortable, predictable and hopeful piece of filmaking. Sairat gives us all of that, only to then show how society can tear it all down, and manages to do both wonderfully, and in a way that makes all of bollywood's efforts look oversimplistic and obfuscatory.