Here comes the other bride
- empire magazine
How do you follow a smash hit like Bend it Like Beckham? With relish... Two years ago, Gurinder Chadha's football chick-flick took the US by storm, raking in $30 million at the box office and propelling its two stars, Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra, to big and small screeen success respectively. But American audiences may be surprised by the Miramax-funded follow-up: boasting an almost all-Indian cast, Bride And Prejudice is a lavish Bollywood-style musical version of Jane Austen's novel. The Bennet family are now the Bakshi family, while Mr. Darcy is now the rich son of a hotelier - played by rising star Martin Henderson, star of last month's biker flick Torque.
"The way she's adapted it is really beautiful," Henderson tells us. His Darcy is far from home when he meets Lalita (played by Bollywood beauty Aishwarya Rai), and he believes that this is where Chadha's version departs from others. "I'm the rich, arrogant American," he says, "and she's the impoverished Indian farmer's daughter, so it's also cross-cultural which is more relevant today than just the class thing. It's a very camp romp through England, India and LA - a sweeping love story with a hidden message of hope."
But where films like Moulin Rouge have merely borrowed Bollywood conventions - musical numbers, casts of thousands, outrageous costumes - Chadha's film promises to be more faithful to the formula. Though hopefully not as long as the average Bollywood epic (two hours-plus), there's singing (well, lip-synching), a race around the world ("We're swinging each other around on top of the Grand Canyon and the London Eye"), and dance scenes that promise to make 2002's The Guru look like an OAP disco. Plus, given Oscar's predilection for Brit-lit, it could even be the surprise hit of the awards season. See for yourself when the film opens up later this year.
