User Reviews

This film is about an Indian girl, Latha, living in Texas who decides to "live her dream" instead of following the path her parents would wish her to follow. The text is riddled with talk about dreams: the main character "daydreams" in scenes from Bollywood movies; her contribution to a video game design is about a character who falls into quicksand and finds a dreamworld; her parents want her to become a doctor, but she wants to "live her dream" and be a game designer; her mother and father regret not having followed their own dreams before it was too late; Latha explains to her colleague, after showing him a clip from a Bollywood movie, that she likes the fantasy dream world that these movies create.

If this sounds heavy-handed and maudlin, it is. The world of India is portrayed as being more colorful and magical than the American world. But the film uses American film techniques which are so unimaginative and inartistic and mediocre as to make me think that whereas India itself may contain interesting people, the differences are merely superficial. For this film merely shows us that Indian people can be just as boring and tedious as the rest of us.

So whereas this film is very ambitious and technically accomplished, it's full of clichés and is at all turns unsurprising and banal. And while it's slick enough to get television distribution (partly due to the generic feel-good musical choices made by industry insiders who worked on the score) I felt when watching it that slickness was most of what it had to offer. To its credit, this film was shot on a low budget and outside of the studio system, and yet it has the virtues (and vices) of films shot with a great deal more money and personnel. Its theme, that one must follow one's dreams, is a theme that's played out with so little subtlety as to make it seem almost like a children's film, or worse, like an advertisement. The best thing about it is that it features characters who originate from South India. It's wonderful to see accomplished Indian actors performing in lead roles. And yet what they're given to do is so generic, so hopelessly lacking in imagination, and so regurgitated from bad commercial films and television, that all I could do was watch in some sort of despair. The white characters, too, were dismally unidimensional, acting only as evil foils to the Indian characters' desires in an attempt to create race conflict which was only as complex as the most simpleminded revenge or teen picture.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to criticize this film, as I do think the director has talent in terms of the requirements of the film industry. And as someone who despises mainstream movies in general, I'm probably not a good judge of this picture's charms. But I would wish that someone outside of the studio system would have the guts and imagination to give us something different than the most generic Hollywood fare, especially when it's made by someone with the rich cultural heritage that this film introduces us to. Some visual choices in the bright, beautiful saris that the women in the family wear to a family celebration, or in the Bollywood fantasy sequences, were the only parts of the film that felt true and fully realized.

So while the film seems to tell us that one should follow one's dreams, it simultaneously tells us that one should follow a generic, paint-by-numbers formula when expressing oneself in an artistic medium, either for fear of creating waves, or because acceptance in the film industry and making money is your dream. In my view this is depressing because I feel that a strong need for acceptance in an industry really comes from a kind of fear, and not from strength. And in the end there is another kind of despair that comes out (perhaps inadvertently), in the suggestion that it's not the dreams you follow in life that really matter, but the dreams you follow in your head, which no one can see.

So the film is really a tragedy in a deep psychological sense. And I think that if the director had more interesting film references to draw on, some of these themes may have come out. But sadly, we live in a world in which the mainstream material that artists have to draw on is itself so worthless as to ruin the creativity of the most enterprising young brains in film schools all over the country, and to ruin film structure and narrative for all the rest. What American independents create is so often either feel-good formula narrative or structureless, feel-bad anti-narrative. And in the end, if what people make is only generic or reactionary, Hollywood wins and art loses.