Atu America Itu India Review

Money can't buy happiness; it can, however, rent it, someone once said. And if it is at the US of A for us rich-and-varied-heritage Indians, even that only for a short time, is the point on which this flick is based.

This low budget movie by a bunch of NRIs seems to be bent upon dissuading you from going to America, as it brings in every vice present in the civilization of the Great Melting Pot, and tries to counter each with all the virtues present in India. And in this effort the director does not spare any of the previous movies on the topic, right from Manoj Kumar's Des Pardes to The Inscrutable Americans.

The film perhaps aims at educating an average Indian about the dark side of the land of opportunity, but emerges is an extremely amateurishly done product - and by amateurish I mean rank amateurish, unlike the maturity of a Hyderabad Blues.

Aditya, an Indian doing his doctorate in the USA, falls in love with Sahiti, an Indo-American born and brought up in the US, and it's mutual. Aditya's ambitions include completing his doctorate and returning to his motherland to help her develop, and here is were the quirk lies - Sahiti does not know anything about India, and so is reluctant to leave America and follow Aditya.

The rest of the movie is all about how Aditya convinces Sahiti to come to India and how the couple surmounts a lot of hurdles in the form of several ill-meaning individuals. In the whole process, other characters are also introduced, and their experiences in the USA, usually bad, are highlighted.

Everybody other than the moviegoer seems to be having a gala time in this flick, and the film resembles one of those Handycam family videos that you get to see in your relatives' places (usually in the form of somebody's marriage or probably a video of the Niagara shot by a cousin in the great Beyond A-mé-rica).

With the story non-existent and the whole movie based on a few assorted scenes, the director has nothing to do here at all - after all, how many times have you seen a cameraman being directed in a wedding ceremony?

The cast comprises entirely new faces - I suspect family members of the producer or director, who therefore do nothing exceptional to make themselves stand out. The comedy is nothing that you have not seen already someplace else, and the music, while trite, is still more than warranted for this one.

It's perhaps easier to get to America than to sit through this.