Bride and Prejudice

Hello fellow bloggers. Bekah here. I recently watched the film Bride and Prejudice, the Bollywood version of Pride and Prejudice. Let me give you a little background on this film:

• It was made in 2004 by the same director of Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha.


• It was filmed primarily in English wish some Hindi and Punjabi dialogue


• It follows the same plot and storyline as Pride and Prejudice


• Most of the characters remain the same as the ones in Pride and Prejudice, but some names are changed a little to better fit the cultures being represented.

I didn't really know what to expect at first with this film. Judging from the DVD cover, it seemed very upbeat, colorful, and exciting. Even the back of the cover made it seem exciting. In the summary, every sentence ended with an exclamation point.

The plot started out the same as Pride and Prejudice where there was a low income family, the Bakshi family, with an overbearing and controlling mother of 4 daughters and a father who always submitted to the wife. The movie was set in India and journeyed through London and Los Angeles briefly. The film started off with them all going to the "ball" and danced their hearts out, which is where we first experience the musical part of the movie. This was where the women meet the men and they all fall in "love at first sight." This movie definitely portrayed more of a modern outlook on things. One of the characters even referenced American Idol. After the song and dance, the real storyline starts to become established.

"William Darcy" meets Lalita, the "prideful" daughter who represents Elizabeth. Throughout the movie, we see their contradictions as well as similarities. It's your typical love story. Along with that love story, other relationships are also being developed within the family since the mother is practically forcing the girls to get married as soon as possible. They even show her looking online at a "matchmaker" website.

If you've seen Pride and Prejudice or have read the book, you can pretty much guess how the movie turns out. Lalita and William Darcy end up together, as well as Lalita's sister getting married to the "Mr. Bingley" figure. They all lived happily ever after, even the annoying mother.

Apart from the story line of the movie, I noticed a few things that really elaborated more on the Bollywood filming techniques:

1. Bright and vibrant colors - Because the Bakshi family were from the Indian culture, they were almost always wearing bright colors like yellow, orange, pink, and green. When the setting was in India at the beginning of the movie, that's all you saw. There was even a point where they specifically put everyone in a certain color and had them in a straight line so it looked like a rainbow.


2. Music - Again, we see a lot of songs being sung throughout this movie. I have to say, there weren't as many in this movie as there were in Lagaan, but then again, Lagaan was 3 and a half hours long. Either way, music played a big part in this film. They sung a few Indian songs as well as played them in the background. They even incorporated some American songs (Ashanti was in this film, weird) into Hindi.


3. Signs of Affection - When Darcy's friend meets his match (Lalita's sister, Jaya), you never see them kiss. They just hug. He does kiss her on the forehead at one point, but that's the closest they get to kissing. Even when they got married, you didn't see them kiss, just embrace. Darcy and Lalita were the same way. At the end of the movie when Darcy and Lalita finally get together, they come really close to kissing, but dodge it and go straight for the hug. I'm wondering if they, in real life, wanted to kiss but knew they couldn't. It actually looked really awkward. They also ended up getting married, but didn't kiss.

This film reminded me a lot of Lagaan in the sense of the characteristics of Bollywood films. The storylines were completely different. This was definitely a love story rather than a sports and "fighting for your people" movie. But there were those few similarities that I mentioned above.

In conclusion, I definitely recommend this movie to anyone and everyone. It's very intriguing and easy to follow. It's not in subtitles, even though I put it in subtitles so that I could know what they were saying when they sang in Hindu and Punjabi. At some points it gets a little cheesy, but you'll have that. This film is definitely worth your time!