Sophia Ali in India Sweets and Spices (Bleecker Street)

There are a lot of parties in this movie, though not of The Wolf of Wall Street variety—they are closer to home. They involve wealthy Indian families in a ritzy New Jersey suburb where, this and every summer, it is expected that they will all entertain each other and gossip relentlessly until the end of August. Their children, all of whom grew up together, are expected to attend. Though they have gone off to college and seem to have more freedom than previous generations regarding their careers, they still wrestle with their parents’ expectations. Alia (Sophia Ali), for instance, is aware that everyone expects her to marry Rahul (Ved Sapru), though it is not an arranged marriage per se. She, however, has different plans.

Alia is on summer break from college, and she is thoroughly fed up with the culture of her hometown—the parties, the gossip, the superficiality. She runs a social justice group at University of California, Los Angeles, and hopes for a summer that is relaxing and nothing more. Yet when she meets Varun (Rish Shah), whose family took over the store India Sweets and Spices, and then invites his much less affluent parents to a party at her house, she sets into motion events that turn the summer into something much more than she had initially imagined.

This is not the sort of film in which you forget that you are watching actors. The dialogue is broad, obvious, satirical, and the cast does not always inhabit their roles convincingly. It does not help that the majority of characters are barely sketched. While some are supposed to be stereotypes (two gossipy girls come to mind), some, like Varun, are intended to have some depth but are little more than a cliché (dreamy, quiet, and unentitled, he hopes to further his education).

One could say much the same of the plot itself: there are no real surprises here. It is a self-affirming story of self-discovery and self-reclamation, replete with hurrahs and triumphant declamations of hypocrisy, where everyone more or less gets what they deserve. Rarely is there any ambiguity. The exception might be in the portrayal of Alia’s father, Ranjit (Adil Hussain), who, though he is essentially the bad guy, is fairly appealing in his personality. Though Alia is portrayed as flawed—she has some classic blind spots regarding class—these are dealt with so obviously they don’t offer any real depth.

Certainly, this movie is as formulaic as they come. Yet the exception of the end, which yields fully to the cheese factor, I basically enjoyed it. I am unsure of what to attribute this to. Perhaps it is that, flaws notwithstanding, the film seems to be having a bit of fun, to revel in clichés and in surface level characterization, to be intentionally over-the-top like a teen drama. I wish it had gone farther in this direction as opposed to the more serious moments it ends up leaning toward. There is, perhaps, a wildness lurking behind this film. Or possibly, I’m just imagining what I hoped to see.