Cast: Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor

Director: Sanjay Leela Bhansali

In a nameless picturesque town straight out of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, a free-spirited dreamer befriends a melancholic girl who spends three nights at the bridge waiting patiently for someone to return.

By the time our hero learns that she already has a lover for whom she waits, it's too late, because over the course of these three nights, singing and dancing with her, teasing and playing with her, he's fallen deeply in love.

Determined to charm her off her feet and to make her choose him over a man who may never return, his love is put to the ultimate test when she asks him to help unite her with the man she's pledged her heart to.

Starring newcomers Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor as Raj and Sakina, the protagonists in question, director Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Saawariya is a glossed-up, all song-and-dance take on Dostoevsky's classic tale White Nights, and also borrows judiciously from Luchino Visconti's 1957 film version.

But where Visconti's black-and-white film stays faithful to the story's intimate set-up and stark feel, Bhansali goes for a larger-than-life, almost kingsize scale, throwing in dazzling colours, opulent sets, imaginatively choreographed musical numbers, a half-dozen references to Raj Kapoor's films, and the kind of melodrama you can expect only in a Sanjay Leela Bhansali film - remember Devdas?

Well, the problem with varnishing a simple love story with all those embellishments is that the very simplicity of the plot, the fragility of the characters' emotions is lost amidst all that showing-off. What you get as a result, is a love story without soul.

An expensive and indulgent experiment, Saawariya doesn't quite work because the writing is flawed and the director doesn't seem to notice. Once a master manipulator of human emotions, Bhansali now fails to invest in his characters even the smallest dose of believability.

Like cardboard caricatures, lifeless and dull, they rattle off ridiculous dialogues trying to sound like they have something profound to say.

How you cringe in that scene where Ranbir convinces Zohra Sehgal to lease him a room, or that one in which he likens being sad to losing a boxing match. There, my friends, lies the biggest problem - Saawariya comes off contrived and fake, and fails to strike a chord.

You feel nothing for its characters, at best sympathy for the two young actors trapped in this pathetic, pretentious pap. Arbitrary, disjointed and leaving too many questions unanswered, Saawariya is easily Bhansali's most self-indulgent exercise yet.

Too busy taking himself too seriously, the director decides he has no obligations to tell us where or when this story unfolds.