IS it possible to fashion grand opera from a libretto based on a Mills & Boon paperback?
Anurag Basu, with Kites, hurls himself ill advisedly into this undertaking. He has material for a goodish soap opera (and this is not a snide dismissal; in the right hands, soap opera can certainly become goodish entertain ment) -he strives, instead, for Great Art. Scene after overstuffed scene is modelled after a soaring aria when the more sensible approach might have been to locate the pop heart at the centre of the pulpy story , about a very pretty couple on the run across very pretty countryside. The opening frames set the tone. Two (very pret ty) kites flutter against the sky , as Hrithik Roshan (who plays an alphabet named J) expounds very poetically (and rather needlessly) on the titular metaphor. His voiceover, here, is muted, but else where he's this opera's full-throated tenor. The veins in his mammoth neck pop out like founda tional pillars, pill upon which he builds his perfor mance. He belts out each emotion as if playing to an attention-deficit attentio audience in the back rows in the lunar craters.
c Subtle, this isn't.
that's hardly the issue, that this isn't a good And that film. The vexation with Kites is that it doesn't stretch far enough in the opposite direction, that it isn't a bad-enough bad film. This could have been a de liriously deranged d mishmash of Ek Duuje Ke Liye (cross-culture (cross-cult lovers) and Dil (who run away) and Bonnie and a Clyde (and begin to rob banks, and escape to the accompaniment of a furiously twanged twan banjo) and Romancing the Stone (and hav eye-poppingly energetic escapades, have leaping lea upon trains and into rivers and onto hot air balloons) and, especially on , the commensurately overblown Written on c the Wind.
th From the latter is derived the dominant love quadrangle, with the spoilt rich sib lov lings Gina and Tony, played by Kangana ing Ranaut and Nick Brown, and with Barbara Ranau Mori as Tony's fiancée Natasha, whom J falls for. And there are certainly instances of soapy sentiment that are almost worth the soap price of admission, if only to witness the se riousness with which they are brought to life.
riousn purrs, "You added colour to my life, my (J pur black-and-white black-a life." Natasha subsequently hints at exactly which colour he was alluding to, as she croons, cro "You are bleeding, my love.") To qualify qua as a campy hoot, Kites needed more li these, and more scenes like the one lines like where Kabir Bedi, hamming it up in his pat ented silken style as a Las Vegas casino ty ente coon, urges J to gun down a poor sap who's coo being suspended by the ankles. Or the one where a kindly old man extracts a bullet from J's back and sends him on his way , across the desert, with a fond farewell wish ("Hope you find the love of your life") and without bothering about tiny practicalities like , thrusting a canteen filled with water in J's hands.
Intentional or not, these laughs are welcome in a film whose pulse is as parched as the environs it's set in. The culprit is the romantic track. Kites wants us to revel in the amoral adventures of J and Natasha, but when it comes to their love, the film turns utterly (and fatally) moral. J is not interested in Gina and he throws her out of his house when she slinks in to seduce him. But when he realises she's rich, when he lights up upon sighting her limo, he reconciles to a life with her. So too Natasha -she's with Tony only because he has money .
You'd think that two mercenaries like these would circle warily around one another before falling in love (or at least, that they'd be in lust first, before it transmogrified into something else). In a nicely observed scene, J and Natasha compare the "gifts" they've received for selling out -like kids at an orphanage stumbling into presents beneath a Christmas tree, they delight in her $12,000 neckt lace and his $40,000 automobile. A little later, as t they kiss, Natasha's eyes wander to a photograph on the wall, of her impoverished Mexican family , and she breaks off the kiss. She knows what's important, and it's not the penniless J. And yet, we're asked to believe that theirs is a true love, when we're not even shown the falling-in-love part. (All we get is an unexplained, and hardly convincing, initial attraction.) A little more plot and a little less poetry may have salvaged this gorgeous mess -but then Basu wants his shots of slo-mo wipers pacing across a windshield in the midst of a downpour, so that he can film a conversation inside the car as the water makes lovely translucent patterns. At least, it's pretty.
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