Should You See It?

Like many other recent adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels to the silver screen (see accompanying article), “Bride and Prejudice” by Gurinder Chadha (“Bend It Like Beckham”), who directed and co wrote the screenplay with her husband, Paul Mayeda Berges, finds it necessary to leave out much that is distinctively Austenian.But their setting “Pride and Prejudice” in modern-day, upwardly-mobile India also allows them to retain some of those archaic touches that would otherwise have had to go – the custom of arranged marriages, for instance, and the importance of a girl’s consulting her family as well as her own happiness in matters of the heart.That’s why I was disappointed that the film does so little with these invitations to authenticity. A good deal of the comedy of Miss Austen’s delightful novel is there, but none of its underlying seriousness. These Indian equivalents of Jane and Elizabeth Bennet, Jaya (Namrata Shirodkar) and Lalita (Aishwarya Rai) Bakshi, are too up-to-date not to have many choices other than marriage available to them, so the stakes are a lot lower than they are in the original.And as for the dalliance of their little sister Lucky (Peeya Rai Chowdhary) with the bounder Wickham (Daniel Gillies), it is a misfortune but hardly the potentially ruinous tragedy for the family that we see in Lydia Bennet’s elopement with his namesake.Having so far acknowledged that the tale is to be told as nothing more than a delightful romp, Ms. Chadha has presumably decided to go the whole hog by introducing into it Bollywood-style singing and dancing. The message is clear. The traditional culture that provides the background to the courtship of the Bakshi girls is to be regarded as little more than a joke, a species of high camp.Yet if we can let go of our expectation that the film should resemble a Jane Austen novel in more than superficial ways, there is much to enjoy about it.For one thing the girls themselves, especially the two elder ones in whom we are mainly interested, are as attractive as we naturally imagine Jane and Elizabeth Bennet to be and as the story requires them to be. The good-natured Mr. Bingley is transformed into a wealthy Indian, Balraj (Naveen Andrews), while the aristocratic Darcy (Martin Henderson) gets to keep his name but is forced to become – gasp! – American.And then Nadira Babbar does such a marvelous job as the embarrassing Mrs. Bakshi – embarrassing at least as much on account of her unrepentant old-fashionedness about needing to marry off her daughters (“Don’t say anything too intelligent,” she instructs them) as on account of her vulgarity – while Anupam Kher as Mr. Bakshi has perfectly caught the long-suffering spirit of Mr. Bennet. Likewise, Marsha Mason does an enjoyable turn as Darcy’s dragon of a mom.The most successful bit of the adaptation comes with rough equivalence between sexual politics as we understand them today and the all-important manners of Jane Austen’s time.Lalita’s prejudice against Darcy, for example, is owing to his being a rich American much more than to any personal qualities, and her learning to love him depends on her ability to see that he is actually quite sensitive to her concerns about the environment and respect for indigenous cultures.Likewise, the scapegrace Wickham is able to worm his way into Lucky’s affections with the help of his liberal views and his affected disdain for the Darcy millions.It’s hard for devoted Janeites not to regret the absence of so much that we love about the novel, and no one will ever mistake “Bride and Prejudice” as the same kind of monument of Western – or, for that matter, Eastern – culture. But as a night out at the movies it’s a lot of fun.

Should You See It?

Should You See It?

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