"I Have Found It" (which is in Tamil and not Hindi) is a modest version of a Bollywood musical. For the deluxe, no-expense-spared variety, you can't top Sanjay Leela Bhansali's 2002 "Devdas," which, in addition to being the most expensive Indian movie of all time, has to be one of the most lavish movies ever made. This is the type of movie where the courtesans at a brothel present themselves via a dance conducted in a room that makes a Busby Berkeley soundstage seem like a breakfast nook. Binod Pradhan's cinematography doesn't miss putting a burnish on any surface, least of all the actors' skin. Everywhere you look in "Devdas," there are patterns and textures and all manner of visual ravishment.

That kind of bigness and manipulation doesn't count for anything if the scale of the production isn't matched by a corresponding bigness of emotion. A commercial enterprise of this size can never be pure. There's no escaping at least some calculation. But that calculation can either be deeply enjoyable, as in "Gone With the Wind," or crassly exploitative, as in "Titanic." Happily, "Devdas" is much nearer to the former. Unhappily, the film never had the chance to make good on its rapturous reception at Cannes in 2002 and prove itself a huge success in the West. The movie isn't subtle enough for the art-house crowd (if it were boring and "tasteful," then they might go for it), and foreign-language films are always a tough sell with English-speaking audiences. That's a Catch-22 that can drive you nuts, because "Devdas" is some kind of classic. It's got a grandeur that Hollywood no longer seems able, or willing, to pull off. This is easily one of the most enjoyable epic entertainments the movies have produced.

The source of the film, set around 1917, is a popular Indian novel that's been filmed several times (notably in Bimil Roy's 1955 version, regarded as a classic of Indian cinema). Shahrukh Khan (like Rai, one of Bollywood's biggest stars) plays Devdas, the pampered only son of a rich household who returns home after studying in England. The girl next door, Paro (Rai), who has loved him since they were children, expects to be his bride. She has kept a candle burning for him in the 10 years he's been away. But Devdas' mother (displaying a possessiveness recognizable to only sons of every country) is not about to let him be married to a household she considers disreputable. (Paro's mother, played by the marvelous Kiron Kherr, was formerly an actress.) She orchestrates a public humiliation of Paro's mother, who swears revenge by finding an even more glorious match for the spurned Paro. Of course, the result is ruin for both Devdas and Paro, and their road to ruin is the stuff of terrific historical fiction, full of incident and drama and romance.

The role of Paro calls for Rai to suffer, to make us believe we're watching a young woman who could literally die of love. She somehow pulls it off without wallowing in masochism, and without allowing the character's good-heartedness to turn her into a simp. (The scenes between Rai and Madhurit Dixit as the courtesan who cares for the outcast Devdas clearly recall the scenes between Olivia de Havilland's Melanie and Ona Munson's Belle Watling in "Gone With the Wind" -- if Melanie weren't so insufferably noble.)

It's that kind of beauty that works for her, in a different way, in Rituparno Ghosh's delicate romantic drama "Raincoat." Ghosh's film is as far from "Devdas" as you can get. It's a stripped-down, largely two-character piece, set in a cramped, dingy sitting room on a rainy afternoon. It's shorter than most Bollywood films (two hours) and features no music or dance numbers. The movie is a variation of O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi," in which Manoj (Ajay Devgan, whose large frame gives a special poignance to his vulnerability), who has lost his job since the factory he worked at closed down, ventures to the city to secure capital for a new business from his friends. There, despite the pleas of his mother and his friends, he visits Niru (Rai), the woman he loved and lost when she went into an arranged marriage with an older, wealthy man.

For awhile, the interplay between them trades on mutual self-deception, with each of them trying to convince the other that life is treating them better than it appears. Between the lines, the truth becomes apparent -- and yet the visit goes on, with neither of them breaking the fragile pretense of good fortune they've so carefully built.

Rai appears as she never has on-screen, disheveled, her hair mussed, dark circles under her eyes. Slamming stars who take on the roles of ordinary people has become as much of a critical cliché as lauding them for their "bravery" when they appear without makeup. But star glamour can be strangely powerful when we watch a star suffer in the drab surroundings that Rai does here. Even when we know the situation has been concocted by the filmmakers to affect us, we are nonetheless encountering something that shakes our most cherished moviegoing fantasies, the belief that nothing bad can really happen to movie stars. Rai and Devgan's acting is very affecting, and Ghosh's direction gentle and unadorned. But "Raincoat" plays on our fantasies about what it means to be a movie star, and the movie isn't the kind that can be shaken off by a good cry. It stays with you.

The appeal of Bollywood is the peculiar mixture of naiveté and calculation that has often characterized popular moviemaking. Sentimental and manipulative and broad and clichéd as they can be, they do not seem cynical or crass about undertaking the job of entertaining a mass audience. When, in "Devdas," Shahrukh Khan sees Aishwarya Rai and asks, "What brings the moon down to earth?" and she answers, "To take your breath away," it's like the moment in "Saratoga Trunk" when Curt Bois says to Ingrid Bergman, "You're very beautiful," and Bergman gives a little laugh and says, "Yes, isn't it lucky?" And Rai is beautiful enough to pull that line off. The moon may come down to earth in that moment, but she's lucky to be working in a movie system that's still willing to find a place for its stars in the firmament.

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