Khoobsurat: She Came to Do Good and Stayed to Do Well

New York:

Disney, never a stranger to princesses, crowns another as it ventures further into Bollywood with Shashanka Ghosh's romantic confection, Khoobsurat, a variation on Hrishikesh Mukherjee's 1980 film, Khoobsoorat. And the studio's specialty proves a pretty good fit.

Mili Chakravarty (Sonam Kapoor) is a high-energy, middle-class and somewhat daffy physiotherapist for a New Delhi cricket team when she is hired by an aristocratic family near Jaipur to rehabilitate its patriarch (Aamir Raza Hussain), who's been using a wheelchair for years. His son, Vikram (the heavy-lidded Pakistani heartthrob Fawad Afzal Khan), a shrewd businessman, is not only engaged to a woman of his economic station but is also monitored by his imperious, upper-crust mother (Ratna Pathak Shah). The brash, often clumsy Mili, in her mixed-pattern ensembles, descends on their estate like a tornado, bumping into statuary, dancing with the servants and winning hearts, especially Vikram's.

Anne Hathaway made a splash in Disney's The Princess Diaries, and the rangy Kapoor (who descends from a Bollywood dynasty) shares some of her early incandescence, along with a Julia Roberts-like smile. (Khan wisely underplays against her supernova, never trying to eclipse her.)

Bollywood films have appropriated Hollywood genres and imagery for years, but Ghosh, using a pleasing pastel palette, deftly achieves a particularly Disney-like polish. And he avoids making-of-a-royal pitfalls: Kapoor's character never abandons her humor for refinement. Twice, Mili says she was raised to speak up for herself. Not a bad characteristic for a future Rajput princess.

Production Notes:

Khoobsurat

Directed by Shashanka Ghosh; written by Indira Bisht; director of photography, Tushar Kanti Ray; edited by Bakul Matiyani; music by Sneha Khanwalkar; production design by Shruti Gupte; sound design by Baylon Fonseca; produced by Walt Disney Pictures in association with Anil Kapoor Film Co.; released by UTV Motion Pictures. In Hindi, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.

With: Sonam Kapoor (Mili Chakravarty), Aamir Raza Hussain (Shekhar Singh Rathore), Fawad Afzal Khan (Vikram) and Ratna Pathak Shah (Nirmala).