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Despair, dreams and yearning collide in modern-day Mumbai in Kiran Rao’s pleasing debut feature “Dhobi Ghat,” a mosaic of several intersecting lives featuring Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan. Like last year’s “Peepli Live,” “Dhobi Ghat” showcases a unique model of Indian alternative cinema, one that shuns Bollywood’s outsized song-and-dance conventions in favor of realistic stories and characters yet, at the same time, embracing the benefits of Bollywood star power. In this case, the star wattage is provided by box-office top draw Khan. He’s not only one of “Dhobi Ghat’s” lead performers, he also produced the film (“Peepli Live” as well) through his own company.

Writer-Director Rao’s script is founded on romantic obsession, beginning with the crush that investment banker/photographer Shai (Monica Dogra), an Indian-American in Mumbai, develops on brooding painter, Arun (Khan). After their one-night stand following his art opening, the loner Arun tries to distance himself from Shai.

Still smarting from a broken marriage, Arun moves into a new apartment where he finds videotapes left behind by the last tenant. The tapes reveal the video diaries of a lonely woman, Yasmin (Kriti Malhotra) – shy, newly married but neglected by her husband. Arun watches Yasmin express her yearnings and heartbreak and, slowly, falls for this mystery woman. She galvanizes the depressed Aamir’s creative energies and he initiates a new painting.

Meanwhile, Shai strikes up an unusual friendship with her “dhobi wallah” (laundry boy) Munna (Prateik), a low-class denizen of the Mumbai slums who aspires to be a Bollywood star. Shai agrees to photograph Munna’s headshot portfolio and, before long, she’s accompanying him on trips to the movies, the market, the local café. Munna takes a fancy to the sweet natured Shai, but the latter’s motives are questionable: Arun is one of Munna’s laundry clients as well – a staggering coincidence in a script riddled with them – and we wonder if her friendship with Munna is genuine or a ruse for re-connecting with Arun. Our ambivalence towards Shai provides a compelling undercurrent of tension through much of “Dhobi Ghat.”

When we delve into the realities of Munna’s life – the poverty, the proximity to crime, the lack of dignity – we realize the futility of his holding out any hope of a future with the jet-setting Shai. In fact, one of “Dhobhi Ghat’s” most affecting scenes is one in which Munna makes that sad realization himself, when the unbridgeable rift of class division appears as clearly to him as Shai’s pretty face.

As Munna, Prateik exudes an endearing innocence as well as a sexual charisma that Shai isn’t entirely immune to. He is “Dhobhi Ghat’s” most wrenching character, perhaps because the stakes are highest for him, someone desperate to achieve a piece of the newly minted Indian dream. And Khan, a tad out of place amidst lesser-known talents, works his on-screen chemistry capably as a wounded soul slowly opening up. While Dogra is appealing as Shai, her character lacks the depth and shading without which she often seems spoiled, flighty and heartsick. The same goes for Yasmin; her character may be the film’s heart but it’s also one-note in its innocence and wistfulness.

This lack of character substance is more a symptom of an oblique dramatic tone in “Dhobi Ghat,” its affinity for precious lyricism over unadorned directness. Rao’s film is candid its observations about daily Mumbai life, but it balks in delving deeper into its characters’ hearts. Still, this is a refreshing, well-meaning entry in India’s new brand of globally savvy cinema, and augurs exciting things from both Rao and her peers.

Grade: B

Directed/Written by: Kiran Rao
Cast: Aamir Khan, Prateik, Monica Dogra, Kriti Malhotra

“Hideaway,” director François Ozon’s study of loss, connection and renewal means to be a heartbreaking tale about the unlikely bond that develops between two drifting souls. The drama pairs up a pregnant and recovering heroin addict with her late lover’s gay half brother, who’s estranged from his wealthy, emotionally cold family. But, for all its sincere intentions, “Hideaway” is clueless in matters of human choice and behavior, as Ozon masks his lack of sensitivity to the material with his characteristic cerebral detachment and pretense to subtlety.

After her lover Louis (Melvil Poupaud) dies from overdose, his girlfriend Mousse (Isabelle Carré) learns she’s pregnant with his child. Despite the urging of Louis’ stern mother (Claire Vernet) to terminate the pregnancy, Mousse decides to carry her child to term as her way of mourning and of staying connected with Louis. She repairs to a beachside retreat – which also happens to belong to her father, the man who sexually abused her when she was a teenager – to wait out her pregnancy and recover from her addiction. But she has a conflicted attitude towards her unborn child – on the one hand, it’s a testament to her and Louis’s relationship but, on the other, it also demands an intensity of love that she doesn’t feel ready to give.

Harboring a lifetime of resentments, most recently towards Louis’s alienating family, Mousse reluctantly allows Louis’s half brother Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy) – en route to Spain – to spend a few days with her. Of course, Mousse and Paul warm to each other, sharing snippets of their past, while Paul dallies with Mousse’s groundskeeper Serge (Pierre Louis-Calixte) and Mousse keeps to herself, swigging methadone, when she isn’t having bizarre encounters such as when a demented woman, enamored of Mousse’s pregnant belly, makes urgent pleas for the expectant mother to be unconditionally devoted to her child. Even more bizarre is when a man fixated on pregnant women, takes Mousse to his room where they both find mutual, fully clothed satisfaction.

Hardly any of the “Hideway’s” conversations and episodes bring us to a close sympathy for its characters. Of their motives, we gain an academic understanding thanks to dialogue covering Paul’s family past or Mousse’s psychological repression. But Ozon’s direction and his script (co-written with Mathieu Hippeau’s script) trade on surfaces: Mousse and Paul express concern for each other, but there is no sense of unselfish sacrifice or affection between them. The one opportunity in which Ozon could have explored that idea – that is, Mousse’s evolving relationship with her child – is dealt with in throwaway fashion using that most convenient of plot devices: the letter, written in this case from Mousse to Paul, absolving herself of the responsibilities of parenting – as if a child were a pet. Mousse’s “sacrificial” gesture feels utterly false, irresponsible and the final straw in a movie that asks much of its audience but gives back so little in return.

The performances from Carré (who real-life pregnancy is in full view here) and Choisy (a pop star in France) are compelling enough, if aloof to a fault. Meanwhile, Ozon tries repeatedly to make up for his observational shortcomings with bursts of sentimentality: A sweet song, a tender gesture, a fit of sobbing, or, most obviously, an image of Mousse and Paul playing together in the ocean, all meant to appeal to our hearts but which evaporate in “Hideaway’s” unrevealing emptiness.

Grade: D

Directed by: François Ozon
Written by: François Ozon, Mathieu Hippeau
Cast: Isabelle Carré, Louis-Ronan Choisy, Pierre Louis-Calixte, Melvil Poupaud, Claire Vernet, Jean-Pierre Andréani