A long, continuous pan shot; gratuitous B-roll; and those convenient look-off-into-the-distance segues: the signature flourishes of early-2000s Bollywood that raised an entire generation on melodrama and monsoon-soaked yearning. For all its mediocre lines and gleeful implausibility, it was cinema at its most conscious — raw, poignant, and unabashedly editorialised.

Actor extraordinaire Tisca Chopra, seemingly borrowing from her own time on such sets, turns these hallmark textures into her directorial debut, ‘Saali Mohabbat’.

She spins a tale out of the shushes and simmering resentment of small-town India’s middle class, looming the crass, grim fabric always with an odd tenderness — like a fraying quilt one still reaches for, out of habit.

The story settles into Fursatgarh, where Smita (

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