Starring Emily Hamilton and Parvin Dabas. Rated G. Opens Friday, January 15, at the Granville 7

Nice intentions and colourful locales can’t make up for bad acting and amateurish storytelling in The Memsahib, a low-budget period piece that limps its way to a laughable finish. Displaying a feel for 1850s India that seems as authentic as the 1950s Milwaukee of Happy Days, first-time writer-director Kruti Majmudar bungles every aspect in this tale of cross-cultural bravery shading into mystical silliness.

Things begin with the unlikely marriage of a handsome young rajah (Parvin Dabas) to a visiting English governess (Emily Hamilton). The authentic Gujarat locations are impressive, although interior scenes are poorly lit, and all those shock zooms and clunky pans are pretty sub-Hollywood. The actors generally display 20th-century body language and vernacular inclinations, with American Glenn Fitzgerald particularly unconvincing as a nefarious British officer who can’t even pretend to be colonizing India for its own good, which was, of course, the standard line back then.

Even accepting that a bunch of formerly isolated Indian aristocrats would be discussing in Etonian English how best to drive off the Brits, it’s hard to imagine that one’s marriage to a redheaded memsahib would raise so few eyebrows in either ethnic camp.

This brings us to the film’s biggest deficit. It is possible that Hamilton will yet have a notable career, but from this evidence it won’t be in the acting profession. The movie consists mostly of naive posturing and lame exposition—none worse than during the ghost-story update near the end—so it certainly doesn’t help that our heroine fills the screen with insipid grinning, bug-eyed stares, and a lot of nervous laughter. On the other hand, her embarrassment is easy to understand.