Love, in real life, is rarely as all-out sweet and high-minded and uplifting as it is in the movies, and the last thing you expect is two blueblood Bollywood newcomers to service this nihilistic notion of romance – but that’s what Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor (making confident debuts as Raj and Sakina) do in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Saawariya. You do not expect the grandson of Raj Kapoor to make his debut as the third wheel, entering an ongoing love story as the “other man” when Sakina is already pining for Imaan (Salman Khan, playing not a character so much as an abstraction of an idealised love).

And you certainly do not expect Anil Kapoor’s daughter to choose as her first film one where her character can most charitably be described as a masochistic, self-destructive, passive-aggressive manipulator.

But here they are, putting their all into this dark love story – and at the mercy of mainstream cinema’s most eccentric craftsman.

Bhansali’s trademark is stamped all over his latest feature – from the deliberate artifice of the sets to the deliberate artifice of the dialogue – and the director is going to win no new converts with Saawariya. It’s not very difficult to see why Bhansali was consumed by Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights (which forms the basis of this exquisitely mounted film).

For one, there’s the romantic denial angle that Bhansali explored earlier in Devdas. Then there’s the language itself. Even in what must be a watereddown translation, here’s what a line from White Nights reads like: “Surely when the hour of parting came she must have lain sobbing and grieving on his bosom, heedless of the tempest raging under the sullen sky...” Um – sobbing on a lover’s bosom? Tempest raging under a sullen sky? Heck, there’s everything here but cues for the kind of art direction we’ve come to associate Bhansali with.

And as is always the case with Bhansali, when these verbal constructions – namely, the pictures inside our heads – finally translate into the pictures inside his, there’s that initial adjustment shock. For me, this came during the picturisation of the beautiful Jab se tere naina number. Raj bursts into this song after being smitten by love at first sight, and he goes understandably berserk. But the flailing-limbs choreography is so awful that he doesn’t look lovestruck so much as a lunatic.

But on the other hand, there’s Pari, which Raj sings in front of a colony of prostitutes. The song takes off on a chance remark by Gulabji (Rani Mukerji, who’s very good) that their miseries, over the years, were alleviated by listening to fairy tales, pariyon ki kahaniyan.

This clash between the idealised fairy-tale world and the real world is a theme that runs throughout Saawariya. Later on, when Sakina has fun during an evening out with Raj, you feel she’s finally shaking off memories of Imaan, but then the clock tower rings out, and she realises frantically that it’s time for her to go to the bridge on which she waits all night for her man. (Talk about a bridge over troubled waters!) Here, it’s a real-life moment that transforms, in a blink, into something out of a fairy tale. Sakina suddenly becomes Cinderella, and she runs away from Raj without even leaving behind the comfort of a glass slipper. Sakina lives in that dream world, waiting for a Prince Charming who’ll come and claim her and sweep her off her feet.

That’s the strangest thing about Bhansali. He has a loud, in-your-face style – a style that’s anything but subtle – but, at the same time, there’s so much nuance in his work, so much to dig into and so much to discover.

I’m still undecided whether I actually like Saawariya – it’s too cold a film to instantly embrace; its delusional characters are anything but sympathetic – but the way Bhansali has chipped away at the corners and painted in the nooks certainly leaves plenty to be admired from afar.