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Bride & Prejudice/ Bride and Prejudice (12A)
© Miramax - all rights reserved |
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| Tookey's Rating |
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6
/10 |
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| Average Rating |
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4.78
/10 |
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| Starring |
Aishwarya Rai  , Martin Henderson, Naveen Andrews
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| Full Cast > |
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Directed by:
Gurinder Chadha
Written by:
Gurinder Chadha, Paul Mayeda Berges
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| Released: |
2004 |
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| Genre: |
MUSICAL
ROMANCE
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
GB/ US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
0 |
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If you wanted to be severely critical, you could say that writer-director Gurinder Chadha has reduced Jane Austen’s classic novel to a soap opera. But is it fun? Absolutely.Were Austen’s Pride and Prejudice a picture, it would be an elegant, minutely detailed water-colour in pastels, with loving attention to light and shade. Gurinder Chadha’s update is a huge, coarse canvas, with vibrant poster-paints applied with a broad brush. But though literary purists may shudder, my guess is there’s a sizable audience for this hugely energetic, jolly, Bollywood-inspired romp. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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| Once every decade or so, a movie comes along that establishes a new female superstar. Breakfast at Tiffany’s did it for Audrey Hepburn. Pretty Woman launched Julia Roberts. Bride and Prejudice deserves to do the same for Aishwara Rai. She is the most luminous beauty to grace our screens in years. Already the biggest female star in India, this performance suggests she has a real chance to become the first Bollywood actress to conquer the world. Not only is she a highly accomplished comedienne and a more than passable singer-dancer; the camera loves her, no matter how she arranges her features. Julia Roberts has called her the world’s most beautiful woman, and it’s hard to disagree. | | Austen’s 18th century preoccupations transfer remarkably well to present-day India. Now Mrs Bakshi (Nadira Babbar in the Mrs Bennet role) scans the Internet for likely grooms for her four daughters, while they scan their inboxes for incoming male. A real live marriage prospect arrives in Amritsar, named Balraj (Naveen Andrews), a wealthy Indian who lives in Windsor, practically next door to the Queen, and takes an immediate fancy to Mrs Bakshi’s eldest daughter Jaya (Namrata Shirodkar). | | Balraj’s best friend, a rich young American hotelier named Darcy (Martin Henderson) is more attracted to the second daughter, Jane Austen’s heroine Lizzie Bennett, here named Lalita (Aishwara Rai). But Lalita jumps to the conclusion that Darcy is an arrogant, neo-colonialist snob. “I don’t want you turning India into a theme park,” she tells him. “I thought we’d got rid of people like you.” | | Anyway, Lalita is more drawn to Johnny Wickham (Daniel Gillies), an English backpacker with designer stubble and a smooth tongue. He tells Lalitha what she wishes to hear about India (“People here have got their priorities sorted”) . And Mrs Bakshi has yet another young man in mind for Lalita: Mr Kholi, a brash Indian-American accountant and David Baddiel lookalike (Nitin Ganatra, in the Mr Collins role). I wouldn’t rate this film nearly as highly as Emma Thompson and Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility. The dialogue here is less subtle, and the acting cruder - though here I would exempt Miss Rai and Anupam Kher, who underplays Lalita’s father very effectively. The narrative also leaves several plot lines dangling in a way that suggests it may have been hacked about at the last moment to bring it down to a manageable length. But it’s undeniably entertaining, and there’s rarely a dull moment. The let-downs? New Zealander Martin Henderson makes a good-looking but bland Darcy, and he’s a bit too much of a stiff, starchy, stuffed shirt. Most young women I know would be hard pressed to know whether to marry him or iron him. Nitin Ganatra gains lots of easy laughs as Lalita’s comic-relief suitor and will go down well with the kind of audiences that appreciate Jim Carrey in gurning mode. But for me a little of him went a very long way, and I felt he was over-indulged by the director. Whenever he’s on, the film threatens to degenerate into sitcom. The musical interludes are when the film takes off, and there’s a tremendously colourful production number early on in the Indian streets which comes close to emulating Baz Luhrmann’s over-the-top exuberance in Moulin Rouge. Another number (No Life Without Wife) is also cute, with the four Bakshi sisters singing about the men they don’t want to marry. Generally, though, the lyrics and music are undistinguished; and later production numbers show signs of running out of money and inspiration. But the greater confidence with which Chadha moves her camera, and the larger budget which allows her to light her scenes much more sympathetically, make this film a technical advance on her last hit Bend It Like Beckham. To her enormous credit, she doesn’t allow her movie to get swamped by its huge scale and the problems of flitting between three continents (India, England and America). It has precisely the same open-heartedness, sense of joy, and honesty about its own lack of sophistication that made Beckham a worldwide hit. | | If you’re up for a rollicking good time with high romance, beautiful women and engagingly silly production numbers, Bride and Prejudice won’t let you down. | |
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