Dava Shastri’s Last Day

Ramisetti’s uneven, somewhat overstuffed debut features a family drama suffused with music and media attention. The year is 2044, and 70-year-old billionaire Dava Shastri, recently diagnosed with terminal cancer, has arranged to die by assisted suicide on her private island off the coast of Long Island, surrounded by family members gathered for the winter holidays. Shastri, who got rich as a music industry disrupter but made a name for herself through philanthropy, can’t resist knowing what the world will make of her legacy. She leaks news of her death just days before planning to follow through, but to her consternation, news websites fixate on speculation about an Oscar-winning love song written by an old friend, purportedly about her, and on a blog post by a woman who thinks Dava might be her mother. Dava’s flashbacks to her younger years are punctuated by revealing conversations with each of her four adult children, who fret about their shares of the estate and struggle with their own inner conflicts. The characters’ intense reactions to the media revelations feel out of proportion to their actual import, however, and there’s a numbing sameness to the family’s interactions with one another, though Ramisetti excels in her portrait of a woman facing the end of a remarkably expansive and generous life. Overall, this feels a bit too digressive. (Nov.)