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Bride & Prejudice

2004, Movie, PG-13, 110 mins

Bride & Prejudice: Review

BRIDE & PREJUDICE
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Gurinda Chadha puts a MONSOON WEDDING spin on Jane Austen's much-adapted story of love and money, which opens with the trenchant observation, "[i]t is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." Seeking suitable husbands for her four daughters, ambitious Amritsar matron Mrs. Bakshi (Nadira Babar) sets her sites on wealthy, eligible, London-based lawyer Balraj Bingley (Naveen Andrews) for her eldest, Jaya (Namrata Shirokar). Jaya and Balraj, who's in town for a wedding, accompanied by his snooty sister, Kiran (Indira Varma), and his best friend, William Darcy (Martin Henderson), heir to an international hotel fortune, seem to hit it off. And Darcy and Jaya's feisty, formidably intelligent sister, Lalita (Aishwarya Rai), also seem to have a little chemistry bubbling until Darcy sticks foot firmly in mouth and convinces her he's an arrogant ignoramus who thinks the civilized world begins and ends in the United States. On a trip to Goa, Lalita meets handsome world traveler Johnny Wickham (Daniel Gilles), who grew up with Darcy and confirms her every suspicion and adds a few unsavory details she hadn't suspected. Back home in Amritsar, Mrs. Bakshi is courting uncouth Mr. Kholi (Nitrin Ganatra), who made a success of himself in American and wants a proper Indian bride, for Lalita. A lavish Bakshi-family dinner, whose guest list includes Balraj, Darcy, Wickham and Kholi, begins with high hopes and devolves into disaster. Balraj fails to propose, Lalita is awful to Kholi, next-to-youngest sister Maya (Meghna Kothari) performs an embarrassing cobra dance and baby sister Lakhi (Peeya Rai Choduri) develops a massive crush on Wickham. Things all work out for the best, but not until tears have been shed, secrets revealed and the lavish musical numbers that define Indian mainstream filmmaking have set the screen awhirl with color and rhythm. The good news is that Austen's tale of heartbreak and social maneuvering continues to lend itself beautifully to contemporary adaptation: The rules of the game change, but the clash between what people want and what other people want for them is as vivid as it was almost 200 years ago. The bad news is that the much-ballyhooed Hollywood-Bollywood marriage is an awkward match: Gloriously seductive musical sequences seem suddenly hokey and self-conscious when they're staged in Western settings, and the songs' English-language lyrics are painfully banal. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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