Don't Lose An Evening With Finding Preet

In the course of my Christmas travels, I can usually count on seeing a movie or two, even if it's just the traditional viewing of The Princess Bride with my dad's side of the family in Buffalo. Perhaps it was a bad omen that we never got around to watching that classic; the first movie I did watch during my out-of-town wanderings turned out to be a complete dud. I might have had a hunch when my uncle informed me that he'd never heard of anyone in the movie, but I was more interested in getting in some quality time with my uncle than heeding the dire warnings garnered from The Dogwalker. We settled in to watch Finding Preet, and while we did pass an enjoyable couple of hours, it wasn't because the movie was good.

The movie, directed by Adrian Fulle, stars Priti Chowdhury, who also wrote the screenplay and whose parents and brother play the parents and brother of the protagonist, whose name also happens to be Priti. This film from last year is her only credit, and I have a hunch it may stay that way. No doubt her intentions were sincere, but everything about this story of a divorced Indian doctor in her mid-thirties looking for a new start in her career and love life comes across as stilted, unnatural and just plain dull.

The film is littered with scenes in which characters speak to one another in muffled tones; it's hard to understand what they're saying and often even harder to figure out what relevance it has to the plot. The scenes in which she chatters with her fellow hospital workers are uniformly irritating and give off the impression that no one is ever paying attention while performing surgery, which is not very encouraging. Another aspect of the film involving the overzealous attempts of Priti's mother to find her an acceptable Indian husband are highly reminiscent of Bride and Prejudice, which had its flaws but was vastly more entertaining.

Many of the cast members are first-timers, and few have more than a handful of credits to their names. It shows. The acting is often painful; sometimes the actors seem like they're reading off of cue cards. Their attempts to put a little feeling into it are misplaced, resulting in over-the-top displays, particularly from Kanti Chowdhury, Priti's mom. It doesn't help that we know exactly where the story is going from the beginning; that's not terribly unusual in romantic comedies, but if there's enough charm, talent and chemistry among the leads and the script is witty and natural, predictability isn't necessarily a huge detriment. Since this movie lacks any of that, though, an hour and a half seems too long a time to get to an inevitable conclusion.

Everything about this movie screams low-budget, from the poor sound quality to the grating performances to the fact that it could almost be a compilation of the Chowdhurys' home videos - especially since we actually see her dad toting around a big video camera and documenting everything. There's also a television in the family room which, like Ugly Betty, features a phony gossip program with an annoying VJ and a culturally specific melodrama, though in this case it's a rip-off of Austin Powers, and the quality on the TV is laughably grainy.

I shouldn't be so hard on the freshman effort of a fledgling writer/actress, especially when the work is autobiographical, making me feel as though I am criticizing her life. But while there was little about the movie that offended me, there was also little that made any kind of impression upon me at all. I only found myself engaged when Priti's gorgeous golden retriever was on the screen, and he had practically nothing to do with the movie. There's nothing particularly pretty about Priti's series of misadventures, and while she may have been Finding Preet, she lost me almost before I got started.