Stars: Ranbir Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Salman Khan, Rani Mukherjee

Sony’s first major delve into the lucrative global Bollywood market is an admirable, ambitious misfire.

Filming the Bollywood version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights was never going to be easy. It has been successfully translated to film before, most notably by Visconti and later by Bresson.

Ranbir Raj (Ranbir Kapoor), a young musician, arrives in an unnamed Indian town in an unspecified time period. His chance encounter with the mysterious lady on the bridge Sakina (Sonam Kapoor) turns him into an obsessive loverboy: he breaks out into songs proclaiming ‘Saawariya!’ (‘Beloved’) every five minutes.

His manic love is unrequited: Sakina is already committed to the absent Imaan (Salman Khan, in heavy black eyeliner), who has promised to return. She waits in vain. Will the lovers be reunited?

Hard to care as director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s effort lacks any of the depth and complexity of the source story or indeed the previous films. This is because you can take the boy out of Bollywood but you cannot take the Bollywood out of Bhansali.

A slim plot is stretched to an unwarranted lengthy running time, swamped by ten disposable songs and Mills and Boon style dialogue. Bhansali aspires to neo-realist high tragedy.

Shot entirely in a gothic art deco style set and mainly at night, the film is a constant hue of blue, black and green light. But, unlike his earlier similarly constructed works Devdas and Black, this lacks the emotional content required to engage and empathise with the characters.

The leads, making their debut, try to inject some warmth into the chilly snow-clad proceedings. Ranbir Kapoor is adequate but he lacks the charisma to be a believable lovelorn lad. Sonam Kapoor is a notch better as she manages to convey that Sakina may be self-deluded: Imaan may be a figment of her imagination.

The only respite comes from two supporting cameos from veteran Zohra Seghal and reigning queen Rani Mukherjee. Told in flashback by the town’s prostitute Gulabji (Mukherjee), she is the film’s only complex character and its moral yardstick. Her big dance number and a spat with Seghal provide the only key memorable moments.

Pretentious and unimaginative, Saawariya reveals that Bhansali is a director more obsessed with exposing the naked buttocks of his male muse than in telling an intriguing whimsical fable.

PG, 137 mins, Subtitles

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