This film is awful, a preposterous little package of cliches and sentimentality. The plot turns are predictable, the film making without artistic merit. I heard good things about the book, but this film does not inspire me to buy it, since here we are told a thoroughly generic intercultural story, with no nuance and no true depth. I've never cared to write a review on amazon.com, but was appalled when I saw the high approval rating (99 reviewers, 4.5 stars) for this poor excuse of a movie. If you like good cinema, don't waste your time with this pap. It's laughable. (Oh, and my girlfriend groaned in disbelief too. There was, I must say, perhaps one upside: it's been a while since I've read Gogol. Maybe I'll go reread him as penance for having wasted two hours of my life with "The Namesake.")