Anita & Me [DVD] [2002]

It’s 1972 and 12-year-old Meena is on the brink of her teenage years. Torn between her family’s culture and the escape offered by the rock and roll of the era, her daily life is turned upside down by the arrival of the blonde, beautiful and outrageous Anita Rutter.
Anita & Me is the film of Meera Syal’s novel about growing up in the Black Country in the early 1970s. Syal appears in the film, playing a somewhat terrifying aunt, and most of the cast will be just as familiar to anyone who has watched many BBC comedies: it also features Sanjeev Bhaskar (The Kumars at No. 42), Mark Williams (The Fast Show) and Kathy Burke (Harry Enfield & Chums, among others). Unfortunately their combined efforts are not quite enough to make Anita & Me more than mediocre.
Ironically the most glaring problem is with the respectable turn-out of comic acting talent–all of whom over-act mercilessly throughout. This may have been an effort to compensate for the stock nature of many of the characters: Bhaskar’s ambitious Indian immigrant father, Williams’ hippy vicar, Burke’s lippy fishwife. The film’s central relationship between an awkward adolescent Indian girl called Meena (Chandeep Uppal) and her slightly older English neighbour Anita (Anna Brewster) is rather better handled by the two young actors concerned, but there is nothing here that wasn’t done a great deal better in the thematically similar East is East. –Andrew Mueller