February 10-16, 2005

movies

Culture Mash

austen brahmin: Aishwarya Rai perfects her come-hither glance.

Bride and Prejudice's mixed melodrama comes out lumpy.

Bride and Prejudice

by Cindy Fuchs

"I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb." --Elizabeth to Darcy, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

Lalita Bakshi is dazzling in a movie star sort of way, and she is played by hugely popular Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai to underline the point. She's also self-confident and headstrong, opposed in principle to her mother's culture-bound notion that she take a husband selected for her. At the same time, because she is the oldest daughter of four, Lalita is also beginning to worry she'll be left behind in the wedding sweepstakes her household has become.

In Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha's lively Bollywoodification of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Lalita is at once the skeptic and the convert-to-be, the daring independent whose education involves coming to terms with her constraining heritage and her desire to fit in. In this sense, she embodies the problem of the movie, which simultaneously resists convention and wholly subscribes to it. The scripted tensions are both regular (generational and class-based) and updated (national and raced), but all lead to the same place: Lalita's capitulation to romance. Here, that means she finds love and marriage with Caucasian British hotel magnate Will Darcy (Martin Henderson), whose unstoppable stiffness makes him seem at once a tedious and unfathomable choice.

Darcy first appears during a wildly colorful, mightily choreographed party scene (this one, only the first of many, occasioned by a friend's upcoming nuptials). While Lalita's sister Jaya (Namrata Shirodkar) spots hometown boy turned London-based barrister Balraj (Naveen Andrews) across the dance floor, the camera ensures you also see the gazes exchanged between lovely Lalita and this very white person: Darcy not only wears head-to-toe white, but he also looks dour and awkward in repeated close-ups that hammer home his marginality in relation to the energetic gyrations before him. When he's asked to dance, he looks sheepish and says he has to work, scuttling offscreen as if he might catch something from all this overt display and commotion (the dancers sing outright of their desires to be hitched and the problems of courtship).

Austen's Darcy was also diffident, of course, and Elizabeth Bennet was both forward-thinking and fretful about her social place. Her concern is amplified by the fact that Darcy appears as an imperialist in capitalism's slick costume. She informs him that buying up hotels and hiring Indian waitstaff is less good-hearted than exploitative; he blanches at her dressing down but eventually sees the error of his own ways.

While such renovation of Austen's witty edge is clever enough, it also complicates the Darcy-Lalita relationship in a way that can't be fully explored here. The movie simply has too much else to do, much of it accomplished through frenetic pacing and graceless editing, so that "important" plot points — Darcy's arrogance, Lalita's resistance, the nefarious intervention of Darcy's childhood friend Wickham (Daniel Gillies), here something of a dashing, devious beach bum — are quickly established and essentially abandoned.

The movie's busy pace leaves you breathless as it careens from crowded city streets, where Indian drag queens advise Lalita and company on effective girlishness, to the appearance of yet another male suitor, the too-hip-for-himself California-transplant Kholi (Nitin Chandra Ganatra), who returned home to find an appropriately "Indian" wife when the American girls proved too self-absorbed and intimidating for his gauche insecurity. It plops its couples down in a variety of culture-clashing locations, from India to London to Los Angeles while delivering a run of East-West dance mash-ups: the sisters cavort while singing "No Life Without Wife," making fun of Kholi's declaration; Darcy and Lalita musical-montage their way across Los Angeles, landing on a Santa Monica beach; there, they are serenaded by a fantastic blue-robed gospel choir, whose rendition of "Take Me To Love" echoes the rhythms of previously heard Indian melodies.

Perhaps the most outrageous and apt culture-crash is embodied by Ashanti, who sings at yet another party scene, something approximating a rave. Though she has nothing to do with the film's romantic machinations, she appears on a stage to swish her fabulous hips and sing "My Lips Are Waiting (aka Goa Groove)." It strikes you as you're watching the predictable reaction-shot inserts (Lalita flirting with Wickham, Darcy scowling) that no one but this oddly in-between pop star could look so perfectly out of place and at ease at the same time, simultaneously appropriating and disconnected from her performance.

And that's the way Bride and Prejudice works, partly exultant and seductive in its discoveries of so many coincidences of culture and partly just unwieldy, straining to bring so much together so summarily.

Bride and Prejudice Directed by Gurinder Chadha A Miramax release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse