I will be honest. Date films really don’t excite me. They are superficial and purposely pointless. But this one, I will give some slack too. It is funny (at times), cute (sparingly), cogent (when needed), and entertaining (when need be).
What gets our attention is the Indian family in the UK, so full of “tradition,” it seems they are a Bollywood breakaway community. The central character is Pia (the beautiful Simone Ashley, who is a Briton-born Indian, and God bless her), a 30-year-old photographer whose younger sister is all set to marry.
And we all know what that means in the Indian community! The same is true of Indians in Britain. There is an early moment where Pia’s mother (standup comic Sindhu Vee playing a bohemian Maa) takes Pia to the bank to show her the family jewels which Pia gets only when she marries.
Pia tells her mother, in not so many words, to stuff the jewels in a place where the sun never shines. The ongoing vein of insouciance runs through the narrative on nimble toes. At times the going gets excessively self-centred, almost like a secret family joke where we feel like intruders.
But the overall mood of the presentation is buoyant, even when the writing gets excessively cheeky and wayward. The screenplay (Nikita Lalwani) relies heavily on tropes from date films. But the film has a certain charm, given the constraints of the genre and a head-over-heels giggly flavour to its mating games.
The performances are surprisingly candid and infectious. Simone Ashley leads the cast with her piquant grace. The other stand-out performance comes from Luke Fetherston as Pia’s bestie and business partner who speaks with WhatsApp wisdom whenever he opens his mouth.
That is the advantage of being part of a movie that mouths homilies like they are going out of fashion. The characters never sound dumbed-down even when the script and direction start heading downhill.
