The Hindu Business Line : Here comes the Bride...

No film has excited as much comment in its run-up to the theatres as Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chaddha's tribute to her Indian roots, and to Jane Austen's masterful pen. And almost no film has aroused so many mixed feelings in its opening weekend — tolerant, to tepid, to downright hostile. Stands to reason, too. Chaddha has been one of the few women directors to have directed her `mixed origins' (Kenya via Southhall) to such resounding commercial success.

The global collections for Bend It <15,0m,,0>Like Beckham had enough zeroes behind dollars to get Hollywood interested; the patron saint of independent movies in the US, the irascible but powerful Harvey Weinstein is reportedly talking to UK-based Chaddha for future projects.

Apart from all those greenbacks, Bend It Like Beckham (along with Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding) showed that there were, indeed, movies which had crossover appeal: A Southhall family could enjoy Parminder Nagra's antics on and off the football field as much as a family in New York's Queens, or in New Delhi's Lajpat Nagar. After all, don't we all want our daughters to know how to make aloo gobhi, or the gastronomical equivalent thereof, instead of getting themselves muddy on soccer fields?

Bride and Prejudice tries operating on the same maxim: which mother would not like her daughter to be well-settled, and advantageously married, and which mother does not do anything within her powers to achieve this happy state of affairs? The 18th-century Jane Austen's Mrs Bennet has a crossover appeal like no other matron has, because all the poor lady's plotting is geared towards delivering her five daughters safe to the altar, and the strategies she employs have resonance for mothers across cultures and continents.

The trouble with Chaddha's re-working of Pride and Prejudice is two-fold: Plots pertaining to romances that lead towards weddings have always been the staple of Bollywood, so there is not enough novelty in the movie. Plus, the standout factor, which could have set her movie apart from the shaadi videos that have inflicted Bollywood since Sooraj Barjatya's mother-of-all-shaadi-videos, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, is missing. What you get is the same-old song-and-dance minus the emotional highs that make Bollywood such a distinct movie experience.

Chaddha has gathered talent from all around the world — a leading man from New Zealand, a bunch of leading ladies from Mumbai, supporting stars from the fringes of UK films, ace cinematographer Santosh Sivan, and Farhan and Zoya Akhtar for the lyrics. But her handling of the timeless story, helmed in the main by Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson (Elizabeth Bennet and William Darcy), Nadira Babbar and Anupam Kher (Mrs and Mr Bennet) goes awry because she falls between two planks — neither plain unadulterated Bollywood, nor proud-to-be Southhall Punjabi.

The man who got the mix right was Yash Chopra with Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, the film single-handedly responsible for arousing permanent nostalgia among NRI breasts in the UK and other diaspora groups. It was also the film that had a lasting impression on Gurinder Chaddha. The first couple of movies she made, Bhaji On The Beach, about a bunch of women taking off to a British sea-side for a day-long jaunt, as well as Bend It Like Beckham, were coloured by her intimate knowledge of life as it is lived in her pockets of the UK: the subversive edges came from her ability to be on the inside, as well as look at it from the outside.

Her immigrant point-of-view does not help in Bride... Her tributes to her favourite Bollywood moments, from the movies of Yash and Aditya Chopra, Karan Johar, Sooraj Barjatya etc, do not jell with the spirit of her film: A scene in which Aishwarya and Martin dance around fountains carries no resonance. Her wedding scenes in Amritsar streets appear stagy, and the banter that is so integral to North Indian, particularly Punjabi weddings, feels forced. The disconnect is especially marked in the Hindi version, Balle Balle, Amritsar to LA: the dubbing takes away even the mild charm of the original English version.

Reports from the Hindi heartland (the Delhi-UP territory was acquired for a whopping Rs 1.5 crore) for the opening weekend have been more than discouraging: Why would a true-blue Hindi speaker plonk her money on Gurinder Chaddha's mixed accent rather than a home-grown I-know-my-mustard-fields Yash Chopra?

After eight long years...

The next big excitement from Bollywood comes, in fact, from Yash Chopra whose Veer Zaara, starring Shah Rukh Khan and Preity Zinta, is slated to release on Diwali.

Coming nearly eight years after his last movie, Dil To Pagal Hai, this cross-border romance with Shah Rukh playing the Indian Veer and Zinta his Pakistani love interest, and music from the late Madan Mohan's treasure-trove, is arousing the kind of interest no cross-over movie can hope to achieve.

Son Aditya has pretty much taken forward the Yashraj tradition of soft-focus romances, in the intervening period. But Chopra Sr's sure touch, honed over 30 years of filmmaking, imparts a certain sheen to his creations. He works within his formula of love-makes-the-world-go-around, and there-are-no-villains-but-cruel-circumstance, paints his films in the palest of pastel shades, and invites you to come, fall in love. And all his films cross over.

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