LONDON, Oct. 8, 2004
PTI

NRI director Gurinder Chadha’s latest film Bride and Prejudice, starring Aishwarya Rai, came in for critical review in the British press today.
According to The Guardian, “all of Jane Austen’s subtlety is lost in this all-singing, all-dancing, Bollywood update” while The Daily Telegraph said Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice “is a benign, deodorised pastiche of modern India.” “Gurinder Chadha’s film cheerfully invents whole new dimensions of parochialsm and shallowness, vast new acres of unreflecting naivety, that weren’t in the original,” The Guardian wrote.
“All the subtlety, all the light and shade, all the dark undercurrents of loneliness and helplessness have been merrily chucked overboard, as if Chadha can’t see a nuance without giving it the heave-ho.”

It said “a complex adult novel has been used as a pretext for a low-octane and glassy-eyed Bollywood romp, at a short length than usual and without balancing the romcom jollity with any of the genre’s usual heartfelt and ingenuous moments of seriousness.”
The newspaper pointed out that Bride and Prejudice is appreciably less convincing than Chadha’s earlier realist British-set pictures like Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham.