Director: Anurag Basu
Rating: ** 1/2
Cast: Hrithik Roshan, Barbara Mori, Nicholas Brown

Let’s get this straight – Hindi Filim Kites is no masterpiece. Rakesh Roshan comes up with a story which dates back to the Kati Patang era. Romance is brewed amidst Bollywood clichés where the heroine invites hero to dance in rains while leaving inhibitions behind or the hero lends his coat to the heroine when she is drenched. The characterizations are conventional and the plot is predictable. What still keeps you attached to Kites is Anurag Basu’s sublime direction where he binds you emotionally with the sheer intensity of this heartrending love story.

Jai (Hrithik Roshan) earns his livelihood in LA by taking Salsa classes and doesn’t mind some extra bucks by crooked means. Luck comes knocking at door when one of his students Gina (Kangana Ranaut) falls in love with him and he gets to know she is daughter of a millionaire, Bob (Kabir Bedi). His pretentious affair with Gina introduces him to Natassha (Barbara Mori), fiancée of Gina’s brother Tony (Nicholas Brown).

Jai and Natassha hit it off instantly and discover true love in their lives, much against their manipulated relationships. Together they elope inviting the angst of Tony who is out to get them at any cost.

Woody Allen’s Match Point is evidently the reference point for the core correlations in the film. But come to think of it, thematically Kites isn’t much different from Rakesh Roshan’s decade-old flick Koyla where Shah Rukh Khan elopes with the fiancée (Madhuri Dixit) of the antagonist (Amrish Puri) who is out to get them. Also writers Robin Bhatt and Akash Khurana seem to draw from Deepak Tijori’s character from their first script Aashiqui for the friend’s character (Anand Tiwari) here who helps them on the run.

However director Anurag Basu scores in inciting sparkling chemistry between the lead pair as Hrithik Roshan and Barbara Mori take to each other naturally. Despite being unfamiliar with each other’s languages, they communicate through symbols and connect through momentary monosyllables establishing that love has no language. While the freshness of Barbara’s face is well-tapped, at the same time there is also a desi streak in her looks that wins her a familiar stamp of approval. She appears cute while speaking in broken English and radiates a stimulating smile that brightens up even the most mechanical scene. The palpable passion between Hrithik and Barbara when they come close for the first time is almost a reconstruction of a scene from Anurag Basu’s Life in a Metro where forbidden lovers Shilpa Shetty and Shiny Ahuja share a moment of intimacy. The final frame of this Bollywood film is visibly derived from that of James Cameron’s Titanic and its then that you realize that the two films also share similar character conflicts – the hero winning villain’s fiancée.