Mira Nair got caught in the crossfire of her own ambition when she made Kama Sutra - A Tale of Love, and if I'm honest, the whole thing still feels a bit like watching someone try to thread a camel through a needle using boxing gloves. It is not that the picture lacks focus, because it has plenty of that, but rather that the focus keeps shifting between a sweaty historical epic and a prestige art-house chamber piece without ever quite settling on the gear it actually wants to use.

You see this friction immediately in the way the screenplay, co-written by Nair and Helena Kriel, grapples with the source text as if it were a live grenade. Instead of leaning into the instructional, philosophical nature of the ancient manual, the film treats it as a shadowy, dangerous secret that passes between hands like contraband. The narrative follows Maya, played by Indira Varma with a sort of watchful, feline intensity, as she moves from a lowly servant to a royal courtesan and finally to an artist in her own right, dragging her childhood friend Tara along for the bumpy ride through sixteenth-century India. Sarita Choudhury plays Tara with a bitter, pinched resentment that keeps the movie from dissolving into pure romance-novel fluff, even when the dialogue gets a bit clunky and exposition-heavy.

Nair directs with her usual eye for vibrant, saturated color and breathless crowd scenes, staging royal courts and dusty marketplaces with a tactile urgency that makes you want to reach out and touch the silk and the dust. Yet the pacing drags whenever the royals start whispering about succession and power, turning what should be a sensuous melodrama into something that feels suspiciously like homework. Ramon Tikaram brings a brooding, slightly sweaty menace to the part of the king who becomes obsessed with Maya, though he spends a lot of screen time glowering in half-light while flutes tootle on the soundtrack. Speaking of that soundtrack, composed by Mychael Danna, it relies a bit too heavily on the same four-note motif every time a character looks longingly out a window, and after the seventh or eighth repetition, you just want the oboe to take a day off. Naveen Andrews pops up as a handsome sculptor who teaches Maya the ways of physical and emotional liberation, and he has this habit of tilting his head and smiling with his teeth that feels less like a sixteenth-century artisan and more like a nineties pop star shooting a perfume ad in Goa.

Then there is Rekha, who swans into the second half as the elder courtesan Rasa Devi and simply eats the entire production without leaving so much as a crumb for anyone else on the call sheet. She carries herself with an imperious, terrifying grace that reminds you what actual movie star wattage looks like, gliding through the frame while teaching the younger women how to seduce a man with a single glance or the flick of a painted fan. Her performance makes the surrounding narrative machinery look awfully creaky by comparison, highlighting the gap between the film's high-minded artistic aspirations and the rather soapy triangular drama happening in the background. It is a performance that belongs in a much better, sharper movie, one that isn't constantly interrupting its own dramatic momentum to deliver a lecture on female empowerment wrapped in gauze and sandalwood.

There is also the matter of how the picture fits into the broader ecosystem of period romances from that decade, occupying a strange middle ground between Merchant-Ivory polite restraint and the more flamboyant stylings found in contemporary Hindi films of the era. It doesn't have the domestic iron of A Room with a View, nor does it possess the delirious, unhinged musical energy of the popular Hindi movies playing down the street during its original theatrical run, leaving it stranded in this weird international co-production limbo where nobody seems entirely sure who the audience is supposed to be. American art-house crowds probably showed up expecting a respectful cultural document, while diasporic audiences sometimes found the Western gaze a bit too pronounced in the framing of the bodies and the rituals.

Declan Quinn captures all of this sun-drenched confusion with a camera that rarely stays still, swooping over rooftops and lingering on sweat-beaded skin with an almost predatory fondness. The cinematography is genuinely gorgeous, full of amber light and deep shadows that swallow the edges of the frame, but it occasionally feels like a series of expensive calendar photographs strung together with thin twine. You get scene after scene of people staring at each other across courtyards while the wind whips their veils around, and while it looks incredible on a large screen, the emotional stakes get lost beneath all the heavy drapery and golden hour diffusion.

The film wants to argue that autonomy can be found within the very systems designed to subjugate women, tracking Maya’s journey from a girl whose body is treated as currency to a woman who uses that same currency to buy her own freedom and artistic voice. It is a heavy thesis to carry through two hours of royal scheming and tumbling bodies, and the script occasionally trips over its own message, reducing complex historical negotiations of power to a series of smoldering looks and whispered aphorisms. When Maya finally starts painting and taking control of her narrative, the movie sparks to life with a fierce, independent energy, but it takes too long to get there, lingering in the mud and the palace intrigue.

Nair has made far more cohesive films since this one, projects where the social observation and the visual splendor lock together without friction, making this ambitious misfire look like a necessary stepping stone in her filmography. It tries to hold too many contradictory impulses in its head at once, wanting to be both an erotic thriller for Western arthouses and a serious historical drama about female agency in a feudal society, and the seams show every time the plot has to pivot from a lesson in seduction to a palace coup. Even so, there are worse things than watching talented actors struggle against a gorgeous, over-stuffed production design, and Varma and Rekha manage to rescue whole sequences simply by refusing to look as bored as the script sometimes deserves.