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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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ANTI Reviews
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| | What Chadha loses in the sly subtext that made Austen's novel so compelling, she makes up for with wit and mischief... Bride and Prejudice is entertaining enough. It has lavish spectacular moments, lots of local colour, gorgeous settings, beautiful actresses, and some terrible songs. But what’s the point of it? Bridget Jones’ Diary took the bare bones of the story and made it fresh. Andrew Davies and the BBC made it sexy. Bride… somehow manages to do neither. Maybe it’s just that you need to understand the conventions of Bollywood – for instance, the lovers never kiss, just embrace chastely, preferably in front of a massive florid sunset. This might work better if there was a sense of the overwhelming attraction between the two leads, but there’s no chemistry there. Martin Henderson is terrible – stiff and uncomfortable – while Aishwarya Rai, though gorgeous to look at, does little more than flounce about and play the guitar... There are some funny moments, and Mr Coli, the annoying cousin in search of a bride, works well as always, but the film never amounts to more than a toothless novelty version of Pride and Prejudice, and the familiarity with the story makes it feel very long and flat, elephants and bindis notwithstanding. For a much more interesting, moving, and ‘real’ look at contemporary marriage mores in India, watch Monsoon Wedding. | | | | (Michelle Thomas, Future Movies Review) | | The Bakshi family are meant to be marrying off their daughters because of their parlous finances, but their home in Amritsar looks pretty expensive even by the standards of an increasingly middle-class India (also, they never mention Darcy’s whiteneness: has India suddenly become colourblind? The scenes set in Goa, from whose waters emerges slimy Mr Wickham (Daniel Gillies), are deodorised beyond recognition. The British capital comes straight from the Richard Curtis school of urban realism... Chadha’s basic benignity ends up de-fanging her film. | | | | (Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph) | | Cheerfully invents whole new dimensions of parochialness and shallowness, vast new areas of unreflecting naivety, that weren’t in the original. All the subtlety, all the light and shade, all the dark undercurrents of loneliness and helplessness have been merrily chucked overboard, as if Chadha can’t see a nuance without giving it the heave-ho. A complex adult novel has been used as the pretext for a low-octane and glassy-eyed romp. | | | | (Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) | | Chadha is actually the Richard Curtis of the suburban sari set: a mediocre, middle-of-the-road film-maker, creating soft and safe comedies out of middle-class life... ‘A hysterical mother with four daughters to marry off: who couldn’t relate to that?’ asks Chadha... Well, actually most people in liberal, secular societies where personal choice takes precedence over parental authority... Henderson has the kind of looks - and talent - that would earn him a place as a heart-throb in a minor soap, but he’s obviously not a leading man. He has all the screen presence of the Invisible Man - with his bandages and shades off. | | | | (Cosmo Landesman, Sunday Times) | | I know Darcy is a pig of a part but honestly, stick Henderson next to one of those still just-about-fashionable Indian coffee tables, and it would be hard to know which is the more wooden. | | | (Matthew Bond, Mail on Sunday) | | Although Pride and Prejudice - with its delightfully precise exposition of the calibrations of class - translates superbly into Indian society, it does not sit easily in the Bollywood genre. The resultb is a dilution of Austen’s dry wit, and the introduction of some woefully misplaced song-and-dance routines in which Lalita, her sisters, and assorted flower-sellers break into rather tuneless songs with dreadfully leaden lyrics. In one particularly clunking couplet, the luminous Rai is forced to glance at her bosom and sing ‘ I want a man who gives something back/ Who talks to me and not my rack.’ | | | | (Jenny McCartney, Sunday Telegraph) | | Bollywood brutalisation of Jane Austen’s best-loved novel... No character has time to establish, let alone endear himself here... The script [is] jetlagged beyond repair. | | | | (Nigel Andrews, Financial Times) |
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, Martin Henderson, Naveen Andrews
