REVIEWED - BRIDE AND PREJUDICE: It is a truth universally acknowledged that an Indian adaptation of a literary classic must be in want of a dance scene. Michael Dwyer on the latest offering from the director of Bend It Like Beckham
JaneAusten gets the Bollywood treatment in Bride and Prejudice, the new movie from the Kenyan-born, London-raised director Gurinder Chadna, following her surprising international success with the formulaic Bend It Like Beckham. She has considerably more substance at her disposal in Austen's much-filmed novel, tapping into its universality and timelessness and quite artfully transposing it to present-day Amritsar.
The Bennet family has become the Bakshis, whose materfamilias (the amusingly hammy Nadira Babbar) tirelessly pursues her campaign to marry off her four daughters, checking out potential suitors with unfettered zeal and even looking up websites for eligible bachelors.
When the eldest daughter, Jaya, (Namrata Sindokar) falls for an English visitor, Balraj, (Naveen Andrews) and they take a holiday in Goa, they bring along Jaya's sister, the movie's Elizabeth Bennet surrogate, Lalita (Aishwarya Rai), who is far too modern and headstrong a young woman to be drawn into an arranged marriage.
Lalita is also immune, initially at least, to the alleged charms of their fellow traveller, Balraj's friend, Will Darcy, who is blandly played by New Zealand actor Martin Henderson from the US remake of The Ring, and in a sop to American audiences, has been turned into a wealthy Los Angeles hotelier.
The movie's lack of confidence in its Indian settings is emphasised in generally pointless excursions to England - and a trip on cinema's newest establishing cliché, the London Eye - and to Los Angeles.
In that respect, the film is personified in the over-the-top form of Lalita's unwelcome suitor, the Indian accountant Mr Kholi (based on Mr Collins), a walking caricature who has moved to California and embraced the American way with boundless enthusiasm, yet adheres firmly to his traditional notions of a woman's place in the home and society.
In the Bollywood tradition, this tale is punctuated with lavish, colourful singing and dancing sequences, some of which - an elaborate dance routine on a beach by night - are more diverting than others, such as a trite song that recalls the Spice Girls and sounds just as dated. These scenes would have been much more satisfying had Chadna not been too timid to treat them with the all-out panache and ambitious scale adopted by Alan Parker's Evita and Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge.
In her introduction to the press notes for Bride and Prejudice, Chadna concludes: "It's funny, it's camp and it's genially subversive!" Not quite, although, in the immortal words of Meatloaf, two out of three ain't bad.
