By Subhash K. Jha, IANS

A couple on the brink of a divorce…a newly married husband whose wife treats him like an unpaid servant, am Italy-returned pompous dude (Pravin Dabas) who has to choose his brief from between two cousins, a pregnant airhostess who shuns the pilot's sympathetic shoulder, an army man who wants to get remarried at a time when his son is just out of his honeymoon, two teenagers who meet after discovering love on the internet, a sizzled airport manager who runs into his ex-flame now married to a man who compares marriage to a toothache…

The characters flow fast, though not furiously from debutante journalist turned director Samar Khan's handsome mounted beautifully visualized airport-lounge drama.

Mellow in mood and musical in its treatment of the stagey characterizations, KUCHH MEETHA HO JAYE lives up to its title. Sweet and tender, Samar Khan's film is never a pretender. It deals with life and relationships and their ensuing vagaries with a gentle smile and an occasional smirk.

Positivity permeates from the plot unhampered. The string of breached man-woman relationships that surface during a flight delay on a surprisingly unbusy airport is dealt with in episodic overtures. Not all of them hold you. Many of them, in fact, leave you cold and detached, wondering why cinematographer Samir Arya's deep-focussed lenses chose to freeze interminably on characters who could've solved their problems while we weren't looking.

Kanwaljeet's bumbling hail-fellow-well-met army-man's character is excessively pitched into the over-populated plot. And Sandhya Mridul's emotionally overwrought airhostess' act becomes tedious specially when she chooses to do an emotionally lathered sequence when we just want to see what the other characters at the airport are up to.

But there're so many warm funny and revealing characters and situations that you actually begin to look at the multi-multistoreyed characterizations on the airport as an extended joint family.

This is Sooraj Barjatya's domain without the gajar ka halwa and the excessive sugariness of a Utopian dream. The characters, such as the burkha-clad Muslim wife Gulab (Mahima Chowdhary) are emotionally stressed-out. But the narrative never gets bitter or anxious. Throughout the film you feel the presence of a guardian angel, and not necessarily Shah Rukh Khan who makes a delayed rabble-rousing somewhat gimmicky appearance.

Parts of the film capturing the quirky contours of the man-woman relationship are savagely funny. The young lovers facing the first crisis in their relationship - how to win over her father - is turned into a celebration of puppy love in its vibrant colours.

"Get her pregnant," the boy's best friend advises… Elsewhere Arshad Warsi, delightfully drunken and droll, eyes the burkha-clad doll who miraculously changes into the tightest and skimpiest skirt, presumably borrowed from Britney Spears, gravitating the teenagers in the airport towards the men's room…

There are men, and there're boys. Middle-aged companionship rubs shoulders with pubescent fantasies in this designer-drama… not quite as compelling and funny as its role model - the Hollywood flick Love Actually - but romantic and melodic enough to qualify as a romantic musical.

You wish Samar Khan hadn't got self-indulgent, specially in the second half where estranged couples begin to toss marital homilies borrowed from filmmaker Basu Bhattacharya's manual for a happy domestic life.

Big mistake. If we cut through the narrative's phoney marital jargon we get a film that's blithe bubbly and charming. Khan keeps the going liberated of innuendoes. The characters flash their smiles and hide their tears with an aplomb that echoes Shakespeare's all-the-world's-a-stage adage. But there no signs of working-class activities on the airport, except for a baggage collector who's lost his cock… or rooster, if you will. ' Day In The Life Of A Soporific Airport' is how this unusual episodic romantic comedy could be subtitled. Himesh Reshamiya's songs add that too-bit to the toothpick-slim drama.

The performances are smooth even and mildly engaging, with Arshad warsi, Mahima Choudhary and Sachin Khedeker getting a hang of their hang-on roles better than the others.

And though the going gets progressively cumbersome you cannot take away from the film's inherent artlessness and charm. Kuchh Meetha… is like a cake whose icing is so delectable that you don't notice there's no cake, just the topping.