This 2004 musical comedy from Bollywood gives Jane Austin’s novel a dramatic new and exotic touch. When you see the title, you know the reference, and you expect the informality and fun, which are very well presented in Bollywood style. All the twisted love stories in Austin’s original work become a single, hilarious and very much Bollywood coup de foudre.
The setting of the story is not much so different from 19th century Britain – a rather interesting or perhaps concerning fact, with parents yearning for someone socially advantaged, and daughters pursuing a Victorian free love. Yet the “Bollywoodness” of the film immediately removes all the formality, tediousness, and monotone of the Victorians.
Knowing the film is a musical, one should perhaps be less concentrated by the capricious and appropriate appearance of dances and music, but their presence is dramatizing the film so much that perhaps they become the only thing that can last in my unfortunate memory. The colors and dances all make the film a gigantic flow of pictures. Even though one may be unsure about what exactly is going on in the flow, one can easily catch up with the plot and leave the brain relaxed and fully sucking the juices from visual nourishment.
The Western actors give a mediocre display in the film. Martin Henderson, who plays William Darcy, lacks the ability to perform the initial aloofness, and the potential to love in him that can be found in the Darcy from Austin’s novel. Since the film, like Austin’s novel, tells the story from the heroine’s POV, it is important for Henderson to show Darcy’s world via his performance, which is way too static to show the character’s mind. I know his state of mind only because I read the novel.
The Indian actors and actresses, however, give a rather vivid performance. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, playing Lalita, a character corresponding to Elizabeth in the original novel, gives her character the ambivalent state of mind, a remorse found in love stories, an unconscious preference, etc. Look retrospectively, one can find that she became more successful and sophisticated in her later performance, Jodhaa Akbar, for example, in which she played Jodhaa Bai, Mughal Empress. However, it does not change the fact that her performance in Bride and Prejudice is already outstanding. She has the skin color that drove the 18th century British sailors to mutiny, and blue eyes mysterious and exotic. Understandably she is found in the list of 25 hottest actresses on IMDB.
The film is so not serious and so not tedious. It is a successful Indian rebellion against British formality, with weaponry of dances and music.
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