Happy returns
by: Amit Roy
- mid-day.com
Gurinder Chadha will take much comfort from the British box office returns which show that Bride & Prejudice shot to number one after taking £1.7 million with 376 prints in its opening weekend. Francois Ivernel, managing director of Pathe UK, the distributors in Britain, and the movie’s executive producer, said: “The opening figures show that this unique blend of British comedy and Bollywood spice has attracted the widest possible audience.”
Since the budget for the film was $20million, she still has a long way to go before she breaks even. However, considering the advertising and promotional effort — Aishwarya Rai has done her bit in London — Gurinder must be encouraged by the initial figures, especially after the trashing Bride & Prejudice has had from several mainstream critics.
To balance that, however, Aishwarya been compared with legends Audrey Hepburn and Julia Roberts by Chris Tookey, the film critic of the Daily Mail, who reviewed Bride & Prejudice in glowing terms — unlike his colleagues in several other newspapers who have disparaged Gurinder’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel in exceptionally vitriolic language.
Tookey found support from a reviewer on the BBC TV programme Newsnight, who described Bride & Prejudice as a “fabulous film”.
Bonny Greer, a well-known black American commentator who is a regular guest on BBC TV and radio programmes dealing with cultural issues, said she had watched the movie “with Asian kids who were loving it”.
Calling Bride & Prejudice a “mainstream movie”, Greer went so far as to assert: “Gurinder Chadha is the most successful mainstream director in the country.”
Aishwarya, who last week featured on the cover of the Evening Standard’s weekly Metro section, which covers the London entertainment scene, has gone down well even with those who have reservations about the film.
Tooke’s review in the Daily Mail, headlined, “Open the Bolly for a jolly romp,” began: “Once every decade or so, a movie comes along that establishes a new female superstar. Breakfast at Tiffany’s did it for Audrey Hepburn. Pretty Woman launched Julia Roberts.
Bride & Prejudice deserves to do it for Aishwarya Rai. She is the most luminous beauty to grace our screens in years. Julia Roberts has called her the world’s most beautiful woman, and it’s hard to disagree.”
This has to be contrasted with the harsh denunciations, the most savage of which was by Nigel Andrews in the Financial Times (“Jane’s unlikely song and dance”).
Andrews appeared practically apoplectic at Gurinder’s “Bollywood brutalisation of Jane Austen’s best-loved novel”. Phrases that leapt up at him included “Calamity Jane” and “Massacre at Amritsar”. He said that “no character has time to establish, let alone endear himself here” and declared the “script jetlagged beyond repair”.
It is part of the British way of life for reviewers to take diametrically opposing views of the same thing. But in reality the matter is more complicated. As Britain adapts to a more multi-racial, multi-ethnic society, culture has become the last great battleground.
