Saawariya

A really small movie done up in a big, moody package, Saawariya entices, fitfully springs to life but finally outstays its welcome by a good half-hour.

The experience is visually enchanting, cloyingly sweet, at once utterly chaste and insanely erotic, and finally exhausting. Aficionados will not settle for less.

It's overblown and extravagant business as usual.

The first full-fledged Indian musical coproduced and distributed by a major Hollywood studio, this fanciful love story takes its unlikely inspiration from Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story "White Nights."

See this movie if you need to get some sleep.

How can it be that a movie as beautiful to look at as Saawariya is so . . . boring?