Abhishek Bachchan wears a turban that looks like it was glued onto his skull by someone who had never actually seen a human head, and honestly, that’s where my mind kept wandering during the dramatic middle stretch of JP Dutta’s "Umrao Jaan."

Remakes are usually defensive maneuvers by people who think the original was left unfinished, which is a weirdly arrogant way to look at Muzaffar Ali’s 1981 film starring Rekha. Dutta didn’t so much remake the classic as he decided to inflate it with air, turning a slender, delicate mood piece into a three-hour costume drama that drags its feet through every single scene. The screenplay feels less written than it does assembled from a checklist of historical tropes, moving its tragic courtesan from one heavily decorated set to another without ever figuring out how she’s supposed to feel about her own captivity. You can see the gears turning in the writer's room, especially when characters start delivering expositional dialogue while staring into the middle distance as if reading cue cards taped to the ceiling.

Aishwarya Rai looks incredible, which is both the best thing about the movie and the exact thing that sinks its dramatic credibility. She glides through the brothels of Lucknow with a porcelain perfection that belongs on the cover of a glossy magazine rather than in the mud and sweat of nineteenth-century Uttar Pradesh. Her face is a mask of aristocratic sorrow, perfectly sculpted, totally unlined, and stubbornly resistant to any real emotional messiness. When she dances, she hits every mark with the robotic precision of a ballet student taking a final exam, lacking the messy, lived-in abandon that made Rekha’s performance feel dangerous. She’s terribly earnest, playing every beat with a heavy, solemn sigh, but she never convinces us that she’s a woman who actually enjoys the poetry she recites or feels the sting of the coins tossed at her feet.

Shabana Azmi wanders through the periphery as Khanum Jaan, the madam with a heart of gold and a ledger of debts, doing heavy lifting that the script refuses to share with anyone else. Azmi has this habit of chewing on her dialogue until you forget how silly the lines actually are, grounding the artifice with a raspy authority. Then you have Sunil Shetty, who pops up as a bandit with a soft spot, grunting through his facial hair with the exhausted energy of an actor who just wants his check to clear so he can go home. Divya Dutta fares slightly better as the jealous rival, spitting venom with genuine relish before the director shoves her out of the frame to make room for another lingering shot of a chandelier. The supporting players in these big Hindi movies often get treated like human furniture, moved around the parlor to fill empty corners of the wide-screen frame.

Anu Malik’s soundtrack borrows heavily from Khayyam’s legendary compositions for the original film, which puts the new music in an awkward position from the very first note. The tabla rhythms sound crisp and digital, scrubbed of any analog warmth, robbing the mujras of their heavy, sensual atmosphere. Cinematographer Nigam Bomra bathes every indoor scene in a golden, gauze-filtered glow that makes everything look like it’s happening inside a jar of honey. The camera loves to swirl around Rai while she spins, but after the fourth time it happens in the exact same song, you start wishing the operator would just lock the tripod down and let somebody finish a sentence without a 360-degree crane shot.

The tragedy at the center of the story—a young girl sold into a life of refined prostitution after being kidnapped from her family—gets buried beneath mountains of silk and gold embroidery. It’s supposed to be a crushing critique of feudal patriarchy and the commodification of female art, but Dutta keeps getting distracted by the shiny props and the expensive curtains. Instead of examining the psychological toll of a life spent performing for wealthy men who view you as property, the film treats her suffering as another aesthetic choice, right up there with the intricately carved hookahs and the landscaped courtyard gardens. You never feel the dirt under the fingernails of these characters, only the dry-cleaning bills.

Midway through, there's a sequence involving a village raid that is so poorly edited and clumsily staged it looks like outtakes from an entirely different movie, maybe a forgotten Sunny Deol action vehicle from the late nineties. It’s a small thing, but it bugged me: a background extra clearly stops running and checks his watch while a carriage rolls past behind him. We've come to expect a certain level of gloss from contemporary Bollywood, but mechanical flubs like that break whatever fragile spell the art direction was trying to cast.

By the time the third hour crawls into view, the sheer exhaustion of the enterprise has flattened all potential emotional resonance. It’s a lavish, expensive, deeply empty exercise in nostalgic cosplay that forgets to give its tragic heroine a pulse beneath all those yards of velvet.