The demon: "Raavan"

The first thing to be said in favour of Mani Ratnam's Raavan is that, after the cultural firesale of last month's Vegas-set, Brett Ratner-remixed Kites, it returns Hindi cinema to an India we recognise and may or may not love: one of bloody violence and the preternatural turquoise of Aishwarya Rai's eyes. The film's dramatic masterstroke is in setting these two potent forces against one another. Rai plays Ragini, wife of a feared and corrupt police inspector (Vikram), and one of the many spoils her husband has taken home from his day job with no intention of sharing - a policy violated when Ragini is kidnapped and dragged into the jungle by a notorious bandit, we assume for ransoming purposes.

Her captor Beera (Abhishek Bachchan) is a legend in the region: "a ten-headed demon", according to his detractors, spoken of in the same breath as Robin Hood - and the lush, verdant greens Ratnam and his gifted cinematographer Santosh Sivan (The Terrorist, Asoka) locate in this part of the country certainly put Ridley Scott's muddy exercise in peasant-pedantry to shame. Yet Beera, too, is a brute, one who hears a ticking in his head; his favoured method of dealing with those who betray him is to leave them holding in their right hand the severed remains of their left. Quick to violence, he's ready to dispose of the needling and troublesome Ragini when - like Cora Munro in The Last of the Mohicans - she throws herself off a cliff, landing (safely, if unconscious) in the river below; at which point Beera feels obliged not only to roll up his sleeves and rescue this dame, but confront an unanticipated existential dilemma: what do you do with a hostage who fears death not?

From here on in, we may be expecting Raavan to develop along The African Queen lines, with the male and female antagonists developing a mutual dependency and affection as they head upstream in monsoon conditions, and certain scenes between Ragini and Beera hint at this, yet the film is subtler, more lyrical than that: even the rotund border guard guiding the inspector and his men through the jungle on Beera's tail (played by the comedian Govinda, toning down his usual schtick) speaks in a verse of his own creation. Ratnam, for one, has fallen for slow motion in the same manner the directors of the World Cup preliminaries have: as a way of isolating and accentuating the grace and beauty in movements that might merely appear prosaic at normal speed. Take the early song sequence (music: A.R. Rahman, lyrics: Gulzar) in which Beera sees Ragini in her flowing orange sari repeatedly tumbling through the trees - an image he just can't shake.

At first glance, Bachchan - brooding, bestubbled son of Hindi legend Amitabh, and the leading lady's real-life leading man - looks to be giving a Bollywood-broad performance, all wild eyes and teeth, but it soon becomes clear the actor has been directed with some care. When Ragini lashes out at Beera with a sharp slate, we catch the glint in the latter's eye - this is a man who relishes a fight, whoever the opponent, whatever their sex. As Ragini's soothing words start to pierce the bandit's thick skull, Ratnam shoots Bachchan on the prow of a conicle circling round and round, and we see how someone who has cast in his lot with a band of violent outsiders is beginning to lose his moorings, cast adrift between the bloodshed awaiting him on one bank, and the more peaceful path suggested by Ragini's presence on the other.

In Kites - where the women were little more than cyphers, dangerous curves - the very maleness of the framing, the underlying love of violence and bling, left the characters with nowhere to go save towards mutually assured destruction, albeit of a transcendental kind. Here, Rai's beauty, too often decorative and cosmetic on screen, is tested (how could it not be, when the actress is smeared with mud and lashed with rain?) and serves to stand for something improving and worthwhile. I defy you not to fall at least a little in love with her during the musical flashback which finds Ragini at home, teaching classical dance to children and flirtatiously preparing breakfast; indeed, many of the film's best scenes show her working on the men in her life - not so much to ensure her own freedom as to shore up the guys' sorry souls.

Raavan is being distributed in both Hindi and Tamil-language versions by Reliance Big Entertainment, the Mumbai-based company that can count Steven Spielberg amongst its major investors, and in a summer where that mogul's chief Hollywood rivals Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Silver have thus far managed a weak videogame-derived runaround (Prince of Persia) and the self-summarising The Losers between them, it again demonstrates how on-the-money Spielberg tends to be in matters of screen storytelling. It's not perfect - dithering towards, then rushing through an ending that's not quite as effective as it needs to be - yet for the most part, Ratnam manages a tricky balancing act: lavish, action-packed yet thematically resonant, his film is suffused with a poetry all the Brett Ratners in the world couldn't entirely cut out.

Raavan opens nationwide today.