Pushpinder (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) comes home to his hometown Bhopal from Dubai. He's 36 and wants to get married at the earliest. His next door neighbour, Anita (Athiya Shetty) is a girl obsessed with living abroad and sees marriage as a way to realise her dreams. Circumstances bring them together. She's 10 years younger to him but is willing to compromise for a chance to live in Dubai.

This is a film about small-town India. As is just about every other Hindi movie (of late). It is placed within a middle-class household. Badhaai ho (congratulations). So is every other Hindi movie (lately). The genre is romantic comedy, I suppose. Which isn't true for movies starring the intense Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the lead role. He holds a deadpan expression throughout, going super subtle with his comic timing.

Name me an Indian family that doesn't have a shaadi ki story and a dahej grouse to narrate and I will ask Dharti Ma to split and swallow me. They won't call it dahej, of course. They call them gifts, and recall them often as insulting, hurtful memories that include thin pital-type gold chains, thinner shagun ka lifafas, bad/cold food or ghatiya/stale meethai, cheap sarees and suit lengths, baratis returned khali haath...

MOTICHOOR CHAKNACHOOR is a love story of two neighbours. Anita aka Annie (Athiya Shetty) resides in Bhopal and her only aim in life is to marry an NRI and settle abroad. However when she meets prospective grooms, she makes her demand clear and moreover she is bigmouthed. As a result, she gets rejected and in some cases, she rejects when she finds out that the guy is not going to move to foreign shores.

What came before, Nawazuddin Siddiqui or Athiya Shetty? In the answer to that may lie a key to understanding this film, which is a good enough comedy within the circle of its two families and their many side characters, but is astonishingly regressive in how it treats its men, women, marriage, looks, age, even dowry.

Suffering from as weak as a kitten plot, the story starts with our leading lady Anie (Athiya Shetty) groom-hunting someone who can get her out of the country. Just because she wants to brag about this on her social media, she rejects tens of people despite everyone falling for her beauty. On the other hand, we've Pushpender (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), who has just returned from Dubai and is also looking for a bride.

Annie, short for Anita (Athiya Shetty), claims she is 'ambitious'. Her ambition is to go abroad and post a picture on Facebook that will provoke FOMO among her peers. It seems the only way to achieve this is by marrying a man who lives, or at least works, abroad. After rejecting almost a dozen suitors - as their status does not fulfil her aspiration - Annie's parents are at their wits' end.

Finding love next door and getting married to your neighbour is an idea rife with possibilities: comic, dramatic and, perhaps, even tragic. That's the base on which Motichoor Chaknachoor tries to build itself. 36-year-old Pushpinder (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) works as an accountant in Dubai and is desperate to get married; 25-year-old Annie (Athiya Shetty) is dying to flee from Bhopal and settle abroad. What happens when they decide to tie the knot with each other?

Annie (Athiya Shetty) desires to settle abroad and is in the lookout for someone who can take this desi tall and beautiful bala to videsh. So, Annie keeps on rejecting proposals lined up by her parents. A 36 year old simpleton from Dubai Pushpinder (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) enters into the neighborhood of Annie. Pushpinder is desperate to get married and has no demands.

It's like there is nothing to small towns except boys and girls and their pesky families consumed by the idea of marriage. Bollywood is dangerously close to locking the clich. We have seen so many manifestations of this view, hailed them for their quirks and shunned them for their monotony that it all seems a bit tedious now.

Stories of small-town domestic minutiae are currently the favourite subjects in our movies and Motichoor Chaknachoor follows the trend firmly. This time the premise is about Anita (Athiya Shetty) aka Annie whose deepest desire is to marry a guy living abroad so that she can give a fitting rebuttal to friends showing off their charmed lives on FB.

Anita aka Annie, a young girl from Bhopal, decides she will only marry an NRI. In the neighboring house, Pushpinder Tyagi who works in Dubai and is a 36-year-old bachelor on the lookout for a bride, is visiting his family. So will a romance brew between both of them?

In Motichoor Chaknachoor, Athiya Shetty's Anita Tripathi aka Ani has but one dream - to leave India for foreign shores and update her Facebook account with photos taken against the Statue of Liberty, or the London Eye or even the Burj Khalifa. If push comes to shove, she will settle for Pashupatinath Temple, but India will simply not do. She has decided she will marry a visa -- find a suitable boy who is settled in 'phoren' and relocate post the saat pheras.

It's desperate stuff and painfully so. A 25-year-old girl is desperate to marry an NRI and leave Bhopal behind. A 36-year-old accountant just back in his hometown from Dubai is desperate to find a wife. The latter's mother is desperate to satiate her greed for dowry. Her younger son is desperate to see his big brother get hitched.