Sanjay Leela Bhansali can easily be called a star-maker. The filmmaker has been instrumental in introducing us to new and enviable talent, which is exactly why fans were thrilled when he set out to launch his niece Sharmin Segal and Meezaan, son of veteran actor Jaaved Jaaferi in Malaal. The actors are said to be Bhansali's protgs, who assisted him during the filming of Padmaavat, and hence the excitement.

It's circa late 90's. Street smart Shiva More (Meezaan Jaffrey) meets the calm and composed Astha Tripathi who is cursed by cruel fate and shifted to his neighborhood. Will the contrasting worlds of Shiva and Astha come together? What happens when they come together?, the answer forms the crux of the movie.

Set in 1998, it takes a Sairat inspired to start with the lead Shiva (Meezaan) is seen playing street cricket. On getting cheated, he beats up the empire very bad and gets spotted by a local politician Sawant. Aastha (Sharmin Segal) has migrated to Mumbai recently and is adapting the 'chawl' culture. Shiva is hired by Sawant to look out for the immigrants coming from North India in the area. He falls in love with Aastha who's already with someone.

Mangesh Hadawale is best known for directing the acclaimed Marathi film Tingya (2008), in which the rural farming crisis affects a boy's relationship with his pet bull. In the Hindi-language Malaal, Hadawale turns his attention to another kind of distress - that of the human heart.

Before we get into an analysis of the film, it is important to mention that debutantes Meezaan Jaffery and Sharmin Segal are good performers and they deserve a better launch than this rusty, stretched-out love story. Set in the 1990s, Malaal starts off quite ordinary.

Malaal seems strangely out of joint. Set in the 90s, complete with nods to Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam and Titanic, it's the kind of old fashioned love story where it's still the family that proves to be the hurdle in the way of the lovers. Haven't we come a rather long way from that? At times, it seems as though director Mangesh Hadawale may have made the film just to feed his own nostalgia for the 90s cinema.

Amor Vincit Omnia -Love Conquers All. And so it is with director Mangesh Hadawale's film Malaal, a love story between Shiva More (Meezaan Jaaferi) and Astha Tripathi (Sharmin Segal). When the two first set their eyes on each other it is in a Mumbai chawl it seems unlikely that love will bloom between the two. As fate wills it, the two despite their contrasting temperament, fall in love.

A languorous romantic drama about the first flush of love, the kind that neither parental obstruction nor death can thwart, Mangesh Hadawale's Malaal is an adaptation of Selvaraghavan's 2004 Tamil original 7G Rainbow Colony, a film that has seen three previous iterations (in Bengali, Odia and Kannada). Is the fourth one too many? Not quite. Malaal isn't a complete waste although the film delivers far less than it promises, frittering away early, weighty dramatic flashpoints.

He is the uncouth diamond-in-the-rough, she is the pretty princess placed on the wrong side of the tracks by circumstances. Love - in the time-honoured Bollywood tradition -- will happen in Malaal but not before the two fight a little, sing a little and suffer a little.

Malaal, the remake of a Tamil hit, spends most of its running time in a Mumbai chawl of the late 90s. In that pre-historic pre-cellphone, writing-soppy-notes-to-each-other era, a youthful romance may have had good reason to take it slow. But the pace at which things develop between debutant pair Shiva (Jaffrey) and Aastha (Segal) is slower than a snail.

When a rowdy Shiva's world collides with that of a demure Aastha's, whose family has just moved into the chawl he resides in, sparks fly between them. But given their completely different backgrounds, is there any scope for their romance to bloom and survive?