By ANUPAMA CHOPRA


MUMBAI - Little about “Kites” suggests “Rush Hour.” An extravagant Bollywood romantic thriller, “Kites” features the Indian star Hrithik Roshan and the Mexican actress Barbara Mori as mismatched lovers who can’t speak each other’s language and end up on the run in New Mexico.

But last October, when the director Brett Ratner saw an unfinished version at a screening in Los Angeles, he found echoes of “Rush Hour,” his own Jackie Chan-Chris Tucker smash hit. “It was two characters that were fish out of water,” Mr. Ratner said , “only here it was an Indian and a Mexican. I’m not saying that ‘Kites’ will be the box office hit that ‘Rush Hour’ was, but I felt it had the potential to cross over to American audiences.”

So Mr. Ratner, who until then had seen only a few Hindi films, offered to re-edit “Kites” and make it more accessible for mainstream America. Working with Mark Helfrich, his editor on the “Rush Hour” series and “XMen: The Last Stand,” Mr. Ratner pared the 118-minute film to 90 minutes. He lost some of the elements that “just wouldn’t translate.”

On May 21 the original Hindi version and Mr. Ratner’s reworked English version of “Kites” will be released around the globe .

For me it’s about breaking barriers,” Mr. Roshan said . “The larger goal, the big dream, is to have an Indian film being watched by a world market.”

Bollywood already has a world market. Indian cinema has an annual estimated audience of over three billion worldwide. South Asians are avid consumers, as are viewers in countries like Germany, Malaysia and South Korea. But the world’s largest film market, the United States, has remained impervious.

“There are essentially two kinds of audiences in the West: mass and niche,” said Nasreen Munni Kabir, a documentary filmmaker . “The mass audience wants English-language films with known stars and familiar story lines. The niche audience accustomed to world cinema accepts subtitles, slightly longer films and unfamiliar actors. But these films must reflect a cultural, political and social reality of their country. Bollywood films by their very nature do not fit into either category.”

That situation is beginning to change, thanks in large part to the staggering success of “Slumdog Millionaire.” It also helps that the definition of Bollywood has become more elastic. No longer a monolithic style that denotes stars, songs and melodrama, Bollywood has also come to encompass something else; over the last decade new filmmakers have tweaked the traditional form so that Hindi cinema also includes films without songs that are stark and rooted in contemporary Indian realities.

Even established filmmakers are willing to break boundaries. So in the recently released “My Name Is Khan” the director Karan Johar forgoes his trademark opulent songs and feelgood emotions for a more grim subject: the plight of American Muslims after the September 11 attacks.

Smaller, grittier Hindi films are making inroads via the festival route. It’s doubtful that any of these films will pull off a “Slumdog”-style success, but there’s hope for making bigger inroads in the United States. Rakesh Roshan, who produced “Kites,” was cautiously optimistic .

“I think we haven’t been able to make a ‘Crouching Tiger’ so far because you need guts, and you need a vision,” he said. “Maybe ‘Kites’ won’t work, but at least we took a step forward.”