Bride and Prejudice

Plot

Lalita Bakshi (Aishwarya Rai) is a young woman living in Amritsar with her doting father and helping him run the family farming enterprise; her mother, who is determined to marry off her daughters to respectable and wealthy men; and her three sisters, Jaya (Namrata Shirodkar), Maya (Meghna Kothari), and Lakhi (Peeya Rai Chowdhary). At a friend's wedding, Lalita meets Will Darcy (Martin Henderson), a handsome and wealthy American working in his family's hotel business, who has arrived in Amritsar with his long-time friend, the British-Indian barrister Balraj (Naveen Andrews), and Balraj's sister Kiran (Indira Varma).

Darcy resists his attraction to Lalita, who considers him conceited, arrogant, and intolerant toward India and Indian culture. At parties and gatherings, Mrs. Bakshi's mindless chatter, Maya's kitschy dancing, and Lakhi's uninhibited flirting astonish Darcy and his friends, and mortify Jaya and Lalita.

Balraj and Jaya fall quickly in love, but misunderstandings and interference by others prolong their courtship. On a trip to Goa with Darcy, Kiran, Balraj and Jaya, Lalita meets and is attracted to Johnny Wickham (Daniel Gillies), Darcy's former friend, and he validates her low opinion of Darcy. Mr Kholi (Nitin Ganatra), a rich, crass, clumsy, and ostentatious Americanized relative, proposes to Lalita. After she turns him down, her best friend Chandra (Sonali Kulkarni) agrees to marry him, much to Lalita's confusion and consternation.

When the youngest sister Lakhi runs off with Wickham in London, Darcy and Lalita find the couple and separate them before he can ruin her life, as he almost did to Will's young sister Georgie (Alexis Bledel).

Ultimately, back in India for Jaya and Balraj's wedding, Darcy surprises and wins over Lalita by joining in the traditional drumming, showing that he is learning to appreciate Indian culture. The film ends with the double wedding of Jaya to Balraj and Lalita to Darcy, with the two couples riding on elephants down the streets of Amritsar.

Cast

Names in parentheses are the characters in the original Austen novel.

Production

Bride and Prejudice received funding from the UK Film Council with the stipulation that a majority of filming had to take place in the UK. Locations used include Halton House, Stoke Park Club, Turville, and Cobstone Windmill in Buckinghamshire, and Southall, Somerset House, Little Venice, the London Eye, and the National Film Theatre in London. Other locations include the Golden Temple of Amritsar, the beaches of Goa, the Grand Canyon, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Santa Monica Beach.

Ashanti sings "Take Me to Love" and "Touch My Body" in the film. According to director Gurinder Chadha in "making-of" extras on the DVD release, Ashanti's appearance is an homage to the tradition of a celebrity making a cameo appearance to sing an "item number", a song that has no direct involvement in the plot in Bollywood films.

Critical reception

The film opened to generally positive reviews. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives Bride and Prejudice a score of 79% based on reviews from 33 critics, with a rating average of 6.6 out of 10.

Stella Papamichael at the BBC noted that "swapping corsets for saris, and polite pianoforte for the bhangra beat, director Gurinder Chadha reinvigorates Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice with fun and flamboyance".