It's a shot at making the East and West meet. But Bollywood/Hollywood, Deepa Mehta's first attempt to fuse the elements of Hindi and American cinema, has none of the seriousness of her earlier films, Fire and Earth. Mehta, needing a bit of humour after the real-life melodrama of her aborted movie, Water, has made a satirical comedy that pokes all sorts of fun at Indian life. But although the movie is often funny it lacks the ground-breaking brilliance of her previous efforts.

FUSION ART: Stills from the film showing a dance sequence

The plot mixes traditional Bollywood with the more risque Hollywood. Rahul (Rahul Khanna), a young Canadian-Indian businessman, falls in love with a white Canadian rock star to the chagrin of his widowed mother (Moushumi Chatterjee) and grandmother (the late Dina Pathak). When the rock star dies in an accident, the weepy mother tells her son he must marry an Indian girl or else his pregnant sister's wedding will be cancelled. The desolate Rahul runs into Sue (Lisa Ray), a nubile, and apparently Spanish, escort and pays her to pretend to be his Indian fiance. When he realises that she actually is Indian, he is angry but quickly, and for no credible reason, he starts falling in love with her. The problem is, his "ingrained middle-class morals" make him uncomfortable about her profession.

The concept of the movie is two-fold-it is a "love song", at times tongue-in-cheek, to Bollywood melodrama and is inspired by the Hollywood film Pretty Woman. As in Bollywood, characters burst into song and dance. Humorous captions accompany many scenes-Sue's first song is captioned "Sue-ji's song: I'm simply sweet and salty". One-liners run rampant-as Sue wears her first Indian outfit, Rocky, Rahul's chauffeur played by Mehta-favourite Ranjit Chowdhry, says, "J. Lo meets K. Ko-Lopez meets Karisma Kapoor."

Rahul Khanna in a romantic moment

The movie is peppered with paeans to the combined film style-"Holly Bolly, Bolly Holly-different woods, same tree," says Rocky. Mehta also plays with the more traditional elements of Hindi movies. When Sue is chided by her father (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) for wearing tight clothes and staying out late, she does not burst into tears but retorts, "Look at you, foaming at the mouth like Amrish Puri from some Bombay film."

Apart from the jokes rising often from allusions to Bollywood, the movie fails to deliver on Rahul and Sue's motives. Both are alienated youngsters, gone wayward because of melodramatic parents, but the characters do not have a distinctive personality and it is hard to figure out why they fall in love. This is a common problem with characters in diasporic films-they are often uni-dimensional people reacting to conflicting identities. Why don't filmmakers show Indian youth living abroad as more complex?

If you watch Bollywood/Hollywood expecting to laugh, you won't be disappointed. But you will be if you are hoping Mehta will once again create characters that come alive as in Fire and Earth, in which the audience empathised completely with the characters. But when Sue and Rahul speak, the dialogue is flat. Sue's first line to Rahul is, "Life is full of existential angst, so why not give up?" This may be clever on paper but does not ring true on screen. The next time Mehta makes a film about diasporic Indians, let's hope she makes us feel again.

-Monica Mehta