Queen of Bollywood

Aishwarya Rai in Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis

Aishwarya Rai’s business card probably reads: Queen of Bollywood; Former Miss World; More Beautiful Than You and Anyone You Know, Have Known or Might Ever Know. She is all that, and as such, deserves a humongous, glittering crossover vehicle to introduce her charms to unknowing western audiences who, until they saw Rai, used to consider pointy-faced Gwyneth Paltrow attractive.

Director Gurinder Chadha gives the stunning Rai her break with Bride and Prejudice, a globe-trotting, Bollywood-styled reworking of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. If Chadha were a man, her casting motives might be construed as suspiciously pervy; she shows a distinct preference for babes over actresses, making a star out of Keira Knightley (and her lips) with the slight feminist soccer romp Bend It Like Beckham, and maybe doing the same for Rai, a paragon of human perfection bereft of nothing except talent.

In other words, Chadha is a savvy filmmaker who knows that gazing upon beauty is a nice part of filmgoing, something Bollywood understands, too. Bride and Prejudice smacks of the director’s ambition to cross-over and crowd-please; like the female leads she writes (Chadha co-authored the script with husband Paul Mayeda Berges), she wants to take on the world. Yet somehow, her films achieve — if that’s the right word — the unusual feat of being at once gossamer and clunky. The gossamer part is worth sticking around for — the jingle and melodrama of courtship keeps Bride and Prejudice clicking along, sometimes exhilaratingly so — but when Chadha shoves collegiate notions of feminism and multiculturalism between Rai’s Knightley-esque lips, the lips don’t know what to do with the lines. They tumble with a thud.

Rai turns 18th-century plucky heroine Elizabeth Bennett into 21st-century Lalita Bakshi, one of four daughters in Amritsar, India whose hysterical mum (Nadira Babbar) is desperate to marry them off. If one thinks too hard about the stereotypes that clutter this movie about the dangers of stereotypes, then one’s brain starts doing a shaky, shaky Bollywood dance. After all, wouldn’t a mother’s anxiety over her daughters’ marital status be warranted in India? Why is Chadha’s favourite giggle always at the expense of the ugly and the fat? Of course, every rainbow-coloured sari and over-choreographed dance number is there to tell us: Don’t think too hard. Instead, laugh at the fat mother as she brings forth unworthy suitors like Kholi (Nitin Ganatra), the Californian India-transplant who snorts like Pauly Shore with a cold and wears an American flag G-string.

Lalita is appalled; apparently she’s unfamiliar with the buffoon trope of the Bollywood genre. If that surprises her, then no wonder she’s completely put off by Will Darcy (Martin Henderson), a wealthy American hotelier and obvious love interest. He’s alternately brash and awkward; she’s consistently sanctimonious and superior. In fact, the queen of Bollywood is a haughty ruler who lives to chastise clueless Will with lines like: “I thought we got rid of imperialists like you!” Even as she and her sisters don jammies and dance around like the girls of Grease — singing “I just want a man who gives some back / who talks to me and not my rack!” — there’s something I’m-actually-above-all-this in Rai/Lalita. She replaces Bennett’s pluck with Bakshi’s rage, and it’s off-putting in a heroine.

Martin Henderson and Aishwaraya Rai get down and boogie in Bride and Prejudice. Courtesy Alliance Atlantis.

The word "rack" is about as raunchy as Bride gets; Chadha follows the chaste laws of Bollywood and has the lovers moon from afar. The barriers keeping them apart are threefold: personality (he has none; this angers her), culture (he’s a developer oblivious to India’s charms; this angers her) and a blond backpacking British lawyer named Wickham (Darcy’s angry with him; Lalita’s intrigued). The men that Chadha casts are never as beautiful as the women; they look like somnambulant western catalogue models instead of exotic wonders. Subscribing to reverse sexism with the glee of a 14-year-old convert who just read her first Steinem, Chadha repeatedly shoots the men with their chests exposed from beneath billowing linen shirts.

The love triangle jumps from India to London to Los Angeles, bursting into musical chaos along the way; a gospel choir appears on a California beach and singer Ashanti shows up in Goa fronting a choir of grinding Chippendales dancers. But for all its occasional exuberance, Bride and Prejudice’s post-colonial lecturing prevents the viewer from getting lost in the fun. No one likes an ideology lesson between dance steps.

In the best Bollywood movies, narrative swings from farce to melodrama to boogying don’t prevent emotional engagement, but propel it. These films might look like fluff to unfamiliar eyes, but achieving Bollywood style is tough, and Chadha isn’t as dynamic a director as her genre requires; wriggling crowds of dancers get cut off at screen’s edge, and sometimes Rai is shot flat and badly lit. Once in a while, Chadha manages to make her look — swear to God — a little plain.

Chadha wants Bride and Prejudice to be a loveable hybrid, a merging of movies to mirror our present-day merging of cultures, a world that Austen could never have envisioned. But will western audiences lose themselves in the excitement, or engage with Bride and Prejudice as outsider rubber-neckers — the kind both Lalita and Chadha would loathe — straining to catch a fleeting glimpse of the exotic; something beautiful but no closer to being understood?

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.