Bollywood and Hollywood entwine for this mix of romance, singing, comedy, dancing, and melodrama, directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali (DEVDAS) and produced in tandem with Sony/Columbia. The achingly beautiful Rani Mukherjee narrates and appears as Gulab, a streetcorner princess haunting the red light district in an expressionistic melange of Venice, Vegas, and Amsterdam. The irrepressibly callow musician Raj (Ranbir Kapoor) catches her eye, but Raj thinks he's in love with Sakina (Sonam Kapoor) who prefers to pine away for her absent lover, Imaan (Salman Kahn). All this longing (it's based on Dostoyevsky's WHITE NIGHTS) is stunningly captured through bizarre and elaborate backdrops, winding staircases, torrents of rain, and a color scheme heavy on the blues. Fans of Baz Luhrman's MOULIN ROUGE will want to live inside this film: there may not a whole lot of weight to all the tomfoolery, but the pain of youthful romantic idealism is part of the message. The music is always the thing with Bollywood films and SAAWARIYA packs in its share of rousing numbers. Western viewers entering the realm of Bollywood for the first time will find SAAWARIYA ("beloved" in Hindi) to be a crossover film that's ready to welcome them with open arms into a jubilant world of high-spirited song and dance, over-the-top goofiness, anguished melodrama, gyrating hips (with very sexy exposed belly buttons), and PG-rated romance.
Saawariya
