Movie Review: Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha)

Very few movies can actually capture the true essence of a well written book. An ardent reader visualizes every moment in the novel just like the way writer once perceived it. To bring a book to life one needs a true imagination along with an audience's universal appeal to make it click as a movie.

I recently saw Gurinder Chadha's 'Bride and Prejudice' excitedly when I discovered its inspiration had been Jane Austen's famous classic 'Pride and Prejudice'. Being a literature student once, I precisely know that feeling of going through a wonderful book and imagine its beauty onscreen! Unfortunately, it completely shattered my expectations.

The tag line is 'Bollywood meets Hollywood... And it's a perfect match'.

In the process to bring together two cultures, Chadha skipped the essence of the novel. 'Bride and Prejudice' is a meeting between a man too proud of his heritage and manners and a girl too prejudice, hates him since their first meeting. How they come together eventually in spite of all the misunderstanding and eventually overcoming their own flaws is the underlying theme of the movie. Ashwairya Rai is the protagonist; sensible, stubborn and intelligent girl, she is Elizabeth Bennet of 'Pride and Prejudice'. Her mother is a brainless women and the only aim in her lame life is to see all her daughters getting married to rich men. She concentrates more on the way they look than their intellect. Anupam Kher as their father has little to do in the movie and stays a passive character. All of Ashwairya's sisters play a part of proving how beautiful and perfect she in comparison to them. The actor dating Ashwairya, Martin Henderson, is the only relief in the otherwise boring movie.

Chadha has tried her best to copy Jane Austen's famous novel but it turns hopelessly haywire. The movie is painfully long and the tale misses originality. The dialogues are flat, story line bores you and the actors can not pull it through as well.

One fails to understand what Chadha had in her mind while making this movie.