MOVIES - WORLD CINEMA - They want to make you swoon - 'Saawariya' is a boy-meets-girl love story with India's typical emphasis on visual appeal. It just came with support from Sony.

Here, Bhansali delivers uplift through a swooning love story. It follows a boy-meets-girl plot, except that the boy (Ranbir Kapoor) lives in the middle of a red light district where prostitutes sing and dance in the streets at the drop of a sari. (We don't see much to mar our pleasure in this fantasy -- this is a world that's largely free of johns, beggars and homeless children.)

The boy is the singing sensation of the local nightclub, and the girl (Sonam Kapoor) is a virginal tapestry weaver who lives with her blind grandmother in a multistoried mansion.

All seems peachy until the girl reveals she's pining for her first love -- a mysterious, brooding man who might be a government spy, or maybe just a paranoid nut case, who briefly took a room in her house.

"Basically, it's a simple love story, put in a fantasy world," says Omung Kumar, who teamed with his wife, Vanita, to create the dramatic production design for the film.

In consultation with the director, they decided to saturate the sets with blues and various shades of blue -- sometimes veering toward green, other times toward purple. That's because blue is the color of the Hindu god Krishna, also known as "Saawariya" or "beloved," and because the story takes place mostly after dark -- it unfolds over four magical nights.

"It has every part of India all in one town," says Kumar by telephone. "It has snow, it has water, it has streams, it has bridges. There are peacocks and lotuses painted on the wall -- the whole film was painted, painted, painted. Every frame looks like a painting. Where is it? It's somewhere in India. What time is it? It's timeless."

The Kumars spent eight months designing 10 sets, and each meticulously crafted set took 40 days to construct.

"Sanjay's a taskmaster," says Omung Kumar with a small chuckle. "What he wants he wants, and you constantly have to outdo yourself."

"Saawariya," which opened Friday in Los Angeles and simultaneously worldwide, is the latest release from Sony's International Motion Picture Production Division, which actively funds and participates in film productions abroad. It has targeted projects in China, Russia, Mexico and Britain, some of its most successful collaborations being the Asian partnerships that yielded Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" and Stephen Chow's "Kung Fu Hustle."