Bride And Prejudice

Distributor: Roadshow Home Entertainment
Certificate: PG | 107 minutes
Available to buy
Director: Gurinder Chadha
Extras: Yes

ANYONE IN IT WE KNOW?
Martin Henderson, Aishwarya Rai, Indira Varma, Naveen Andrews, Nitin Ganatra, Daniel Gillies

WHAT’S IT ABOUT THEN?
This full on albeit somewhat westernised Bollywood musical tackles Jane Austen’s 19th century comedy of love and manners and updates it to modern day India (and London and LA), the plot centres around Mrs Bakshi and her attempts to marry off four eligible daughters, however her pre arranged marriage plans go awry when Lalita (Rai) meets American hotelier Will Darcy (Henderson) as well as the charming Johnny Wickham (Gillies)….

SO IS IT ANY GOOD?
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has proved to be incredibly attractive to modern day film makers, the BBC got the ball rolling in 94 with their Colin Firth wet t-shirted Mr Darcy in a beautifully recreated period version and of course Bridget Jones in P+P for the modern girl, now Austen goes Bollywood, so intrinsically classic though is the story that you could set Pride and Prejudice in space (hey now there’s an idea!!) and it would still work.

Enough of the comparisons though, in it’s own right Bride is fantastic, great fun and solidly entertaining, director Chadha was also behind Bend It Like Beckham and this movie has a similar flavour, the leads are first rate(this is the beautiful Aishwarya Rai’s first English language movie but she has been a big Bollywood name for awhile now) and Henderson does well in the Darcy role, there are also familiar names in the supporting cast, Lost’s Naveen Andrews crops up as does the sexy Indira Varma as his sarcastic sister.

Hollywood is having something of a love affair with Bollywood at the moment and if you’ve never sampled the delights of a Bollywood musical (on the whole they are pretty much straight down the line old fashioned romantic tales where a kiss on the cheek is a raunchy sex scene and a happy ending is always in sight) then this is the perfect introduction, Bollywood enough to take in the spectacle, westernised enough to draw in a big audience. Good stuff.

ANY SPECIAL FEATURES?
Extras are plentiful including an audio commentary, a making of doco, featurettes on the leads as well as on production design, make up and choreography, there is also an extended Ashanti song, deleted scenes and song out-takes, footage from the UK premiere, a fun feature where the “crew do the songs”, the theatrical trailer, a teaser trailer, a photo gallery and a DVD-Rom feature of production notes and cast and crew bios.