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Now Avaialble on Blu Ray Mira Nair's
KAMA SUTRA
A Tale of Love
Directed by Mira Nair; written by Helena Kriel and Ms. Nair


Ministering to indulgence in luxury, pleasure, and sensuous enjoyment ''Kama Sutra'' follows Maya (Indira Varma), a 16th-century Indian Cosmo girl, as she learns the ways of love.

Not all these ways are what you might expect, given that the film takes its title from the fourth-century Indian text famed for its enterprising sexual diagrams. For every interesting mention of a position like Twisting of the Creeper, the film carries plenty of other baggage. Much of it follows Maya's troubles in finding Mr. Right.



Maya, first seen in girlhood, has a lifelong rival in Tara (Sarita Choudhury, a star of Ms. Nair's ''Mississippi Masala''), who is a princess. Maya is Tara's servant, though it is immediately clear that Kama Sutra training is a great leveler in this culture. The young girl who shows a flair for the Dance of Enticement, as Maya does when both girls are trained by a top-seeded courtesan named Rasa Devi (Rekha, a popular Indian film star), can expect definite advantages in life.

Sure enough, on the eve of Tara's wedding to the handsome king, Raj Singh (Naveen Andrews, who plays Kip in ''The English Patient''), Maya glides into his bedchamber and shows exactly how the Dance of Enticement gets results. While the virginal bride is being taught by her elders that she should allow the groom to put a beetlenut in her mouth, Maya takes a more direct approach.

As a consequence of this candlelit tryst, Raj Singh becomes obsessed with her, and Tara becomes her permanent rival.

Maya falls in love with him, though the increasingly dissipated king also continues to pursue her. Poor Tara, who embodies the powerlessness of women without Kama Sutra skills in this culture, must take comfort in her queenly stature while Raj Singh smokes opium and chases courtesans.
Buy Kama Sutra  at www.njmtv.com