HRITHIK ROSHAN AND BARBARA MORI IN KITES

Kites is a film about languages. The heroine speaks Spanish, the hero speaks English and there’s also a smattering of Hindi thrown in there somewhere. So how about a Bengali limerick to sum up the most awaited movie this summer? (The director would approve, we bet.) So in Sukumar Ray’s words: “Tele jole mish khay, shunechho ta keu ki?”

Now, who is ‘oil’ and who is ‘water’ between Rakesh Roshan and Anurag Basu depends on you. You can either belong to the supernatural Krrish fan club or swear by the soulful style of Life in a... Metro. You can either break into impromptu jigs chirping “Jadoo” “Jadoo” or jive to the chants of meri jaan. Label it ‘big’ and ‘small’ or ‘massy’ and ‘niche’ but these two schools of cinema just don’t mix!

In the prologue, we are told about the title. How kites always soar in pairs and then one brings down the other. Well, the weekend box-office numbers may well soar but Rakesh Roshan and Anurag Basu have sure brought each other down.

Without going into the gory details of what happened on the sets, let’s just go by the credits. Story and producer: Rakesh Roshan; director: Anurag Basu. Now there’s only that much slickness and shine you can bring to a storyline which is thinner than Shilpa Shetty’s waistline and features characters who are just about as consistent as Shilpa Shetty’s nose. So you have a painstakingly homogenised mediocre material being choreographed to a new-age cutting-edge treatment. Not surprising, it’s neither here, nor there.

They may keep claiming otherwise but the basic premise of Kites is ditto that of Match Point — two ambitious gold-diggers, one of whom snares a brother and the other his sister to reach out to their riches, end up falling in love. In hindsight, perhaps it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to copy the rest of the film but Roshan chooses to send his lovers on a run. And they keep running for the rest of the running time. No second act, no third act, just bhagam bhag. So what turned out to be a wicked exploration of lust and morality in the Woody Allen film changes track here to a forced Bolly-woody romantic action thriller.

Even that would have worked just fine, had the lead pair been allowed to smoulder with sexual desire. You show the love between two really attractive people blossoming out of physical attraction and then you make a whole lot of hullabaloo over a solitary kiss? How do you justify that ‘U/A’ tag? A film where every frame is bursting at the seams with passion has a love story which survives simply on shy smiles? Why is an illegal immigrant from Mexico and an 11-times-fake-married hustler so coy about sex? Bare torsos and bikini-bordered tans are easy on the eye but this is an adult love story, not about a plastic alien coming out of a rug sack. Get that, Papa Roshan?

And what a pair the makers did have at their disposal! Returning after two years Hrithik Roshan doesn’t put a foot wrong — not just while dancing, which is expectedly breathtaking — except perhaps the forced American accent. But then we have heard him at a press conference in Singapore and that’s how the man speaks English as soon as he sets foot abroad. Shooting Hrithik in more close-ups than he’s ever been framed, Anurag exploits those green eyes, which convey every emotion with equal intensity, from the thrill of togetherness to the anguish of separation.

Barbara Mori is a dazzler. Whether in bikini or bridalwear, in tears or triumph, you can’t take your eyes off this Mexican belleza. You have seen Hrithik do his thing before, it is the novelty of Mori that keeps that sluggish second half bearable. Unlike leading ladies of previous Roshan home productions, Mori is not sidelined by Hrithik’s footage and that bears testimony to the attention the foreign import commands.

With few plotpoints to play with Anurag goes wild with his visuals. Working in tandem with cinematographer Ayananka Bose, the director shoots Las Vegas and New Mexico with a flamboyance alien to Indian films. There are also references galore — some from other’s films, some from his own. So while there’s the eyes-meeting-through-the-aquarium scene from Romeo + Juliet and the musical-shootout-in-the-rain scene from Road to Perdition, the red-neoned frames of Gangster and Metro are back. But at the end, he would have done well to freeze the frame like Thelma & Louise and not go the whole — laughable — underwater distance.

Even this visceral trip is interrupted by Roshan. The other brother this time. There’s nothing wrong with Rajesh Roshan’s songs when you play the CD, but set to fast car chases on the road and lavish cruises on the sea, the slow melodies sound completely out of place. The Salim-Sulaiman background score works much better but even there why repeat the big bangs when the same scene is being shown twice over?

There are few dialogues in Kites but those that are there are not very good and certainly fall flat in the stylish scheme of things. Lines like “You have a dream… I have the same dream… now we have a bigger dream” can fit into a Rakesh Roshan film (remember “mere bete aayenge, ek din zaroor aayenge” in Karan Arjun?) but here they don’t mean anything to us, even though unfortunately we do follow this language.

You can see where the much-boasted-about big money has gone. Cars tumble and pile up (the closest anything gets to sex in the film!) like a Need for Speed game demo every now and then to end up in a fireball. It looks good the first time, not bad the second time but the third time onwards, you don’t want to cut to the chase but rather cut out the chase. Really you don’t need a Brett Ratner to tell you that Kites needs to be cut down to size in these rush hour days.

But 126 minutes is what you have to endure and 550 rupees is the maximum you can spend for a ticket to fly Kites this weekend. We suggest you watch it once for the lead pair and then rip it apart for what might have been. It’s completely crazy to end a Bollywood movie review with a Winston Churchill quote but then, come on, that’s really what Kites is all about — a bundle of opposites, a clutter of contradictions. “Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it,” said the wise old man. The Roshans, we bet, never had a weathercock around.