|
|
|
‘Bride’ and prejudice
The premier to Gurinder Chadha’s new film Bride and Prejudice kicked off at Leister Square, London, with the deafening pulses of traditional Punjabi dhols in the background, the fanfare and verve an unusual addition to what is generally a more stoic affair.
Amongst the breed of South-asian filmmakers bringing this eastern masala to cinema screens, Gurinder Chadha was the indomitable juggernaut. After the remarkable but well-deserved success of Bend it like Beckham, the director became the poster child of a movement that till then had to content itself with relative obscurity in the sub-mainstream genres.
Double-decker buses weaved through the London traffic sporting the film’s advert featuring a beaming Aishwariya Rai; magazines and newsstands had her face plastered all over. Bollywood had arrived again, bigger than ever before.
The director seemed to have set herself the challenge of portraying India as a modern tourist destination, studded with swanky hotels, Goan beach raves and tractor-driving agriculturalists who insist on wearing clothes by Tommy Hilfiger
The hype couldn’t have been any more prominent and unfortunately, neither could the final verdict on the film have been any more elusive.
The movie is based on a reinterpretation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, with Austen’s quintessentially English Bennets transformed into the Bakshis of contemporary Amritsar, complete with ABCD relatives. “It’s very true to Jane Austen and the spirit of the book, and I think if she came down and went to see it in her local Odeon, she would like it,” insists Chadha.
There is no accounting for ghoulish tastes, but for mere mortals the movie was certainly not much less agonizing than the ramblings of roaming undead authors waiting an eternity for the conclusion of their earthly sentences. I could certainly understand their predicament as the feature wound on unrelentingly.
In the dawning minutes of the film, the predictable picture of an exotic and mysterious land of India was painted with the decidedly orthodox brush of cliched scenes — the elephants, market scenes and people dancing for no apparent reason. Interspersed within these images of the vibrant multitude were mindlessly implausible, but apparently serious, situations like Rai helping manage her father’s agrarian holdings atop a tractor while clad in a tank-top and low-slung jeans.
As the excruciating minutes abounding with Anu Malik’s decidedly questionable ‘musicals’ progressed, there emerged a nagging doubt over the aspirations of the film. I began to suspect if this really was merely an exceptionally pedestrian screenplay or instead, just a travel brochure by the Indian tourism ministry. Indeed, the director seemed to have gratuitously set herself the challenge of portraying India as a modern tourist destination, studded with swanky hotels, Goan beach raves and tractor-driving agriculturalists who insist on wearing clothes by Tommy Hilfiger. We weren’t left in the limbo for too long though, and soon subliminal messaging was considered too indirect, and a gyrating ‘item dancer’ was procured to lip sync to a song that proclaimed “India is where I want to be, India is the place to be”. So that was settled. Perhaps even this pronounced editorial bent could have been delegated to a footnote, had the plot itself been any more exciting and worthy of comment.
In fact, throughout the insufferable minutes that the movie tried desperately to ‘find itself’, it remained a collection of disparate footage, lacking a single cohesive narrative. It certainly didn’t bring alive the nuanced, poignant and insightful prose of Austen and neither did it manage to redeem itself as a true Bollywood creation.
Its deodorized and cloyingly treacly visions of India had it tripping all over itself, illustrating an uptight cultural self consciousness in sharp relief to the flippant but nevertheless fluid ease of movies from Bollywood.
The effortless comic relief of the first movie was replaced with a contrived ‘humour’ that furthered this overall perception of desperation that seemed to pervade the whole enterprise. In these desperate dyeing throes of an imagination spent, the script relied on the bizarre rather than the truly witty. A particular gem was the scene where one of the sisters proceeded to do a snake dance in front of Mr Darcy which was as ridiculous as it was puzzling.
Even then, the movie could have somehow remained salvageable had the star attraction, Aishwariya not put in such an uninspired effort in her maiden English role. Throughout the movie, she sustained an unbearably affected and unnatural accent that made her sound more like a call-centre hopeful than an even remotely plausible native speaker of the language. Incorrigibly pretentious and devoid of that essential malleability that makes for a true actor, she never managed to become a part of film, of the microcosm the movie tried in vain to portray.
And instead of the sharp intelligence that Lizzy was renowned for — in the novel, of course — Ash’s evident narcissism only made her Indian alter-ego Lalita sound more like an obnoxious wisecracker. It didn’t of course help that the protagonists completely lacked that essential element of ‘chemistry’ so in fashion with all critics great and small. Understandably, the movie has received what is at best a lukewarm reception at the hands of media critics in the UK, conventionally the largest market for movies of this genre. From questioning the films ‘feminist credentials’ (The Times likened them to a ‘giant blancmange’) to censuring the film’s ‘unreflecting naivety’, the British press has heaped unmitigated criticism on almost all facets of the production.
In conclusion, while Bride and Prejudice was the certainly the archetype of a fundamentally misconstructed and amateurish film, it disappointed chiefly because one would have expected better from the likes of Gurinder Chadha.
|
|
|
|
