Is there anything more embarrassing than an indie filmmaker blatantly and unsuccessfully trying to parrot the conventions of mainstream cinema? Deepa Mehta's Bollywood/Hollywood departs from the somber social realism of her recent films Fire and Earth for a lighthearted spoof of how movie love stories define the lives of a family of upper-class Indian-Canadians. But Mehta defines both "Hollywood" and "Bollywood" in the broadest terms, filling her film with exaggerated visuals and silly comic touches, like a suburban lawn sporting a forest of pink flamingos, or an eccentric grandmother who quotes Shakespeare on cue. The incessant cuteness wouldn't be such a problem if Bollywood/Hollywood's plot weren't so packed with supertextual meaning. Mehta overthinks just about every aspect of the story, right down to making the hero's brother a filmmaker-wannabe with a digital-video camera permanently attached to his palm. Rahul Khanna plays a millionaire whose family demands that he start dating a nice Indian girl before they'll allow his sister to get married, so he brings home ethnic-looking Lisa Ray, whom he meets in a bar and hires to play his Indian girlfriend. The echoes of Pretty Woman and classic screwball comedy are heavily intended, and the frequent breaks for exotic techno-pop song-and-dance numbers swipe the Bollywood form in a way that's meant to be "fun" (quotation marks inclusive). Mehta adds further distancing layers by inserting periodic supertitles to explain the Bollywood references, as well as to comment on the plot and announce the songs. She could probably explain in detail how all of this, as she puts it, comments on "both Bollywood and Hollywood's love of schematics," but diagramming the sentences wouldn't make them any more spry, because her take on the romantic-comedy form isn't grotesque enough to be parody, and isn't true enough to be homage. Instead, the film stays poised awkwardly between a cynical cash-in on arthouse populism like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and deconstruction of that same aesthetic. Bollywood/Hollywood does have its charms: Ray has star-level charisma, the opulent Indian-Canadian milieu is attractive, and the songs are catchy. But choppy editing throughout, and especially during the musical numbers, can't be chalked up to a filmmaker aping a false conventionality. It's just mediocrity, further soured by bad intentions.