The subversive Ms Chadha

In India on the other hand disappointment over B&P heroine Aishwarya Rai’s performance and the unexpected resemblance of the film to the regular Bollywood blockbuster has led to the nagging suspicion that Chadha was attempting to send up Bollywood. No way, says Chadha, maintaining that her film was a tribute to the movies she had grown up with, those made by Raj Kapoor, Manoj Kumar and the chiffon romances of Yash Chopra.

What then? The question remains. Why did the director of the finely nuanced, warmly felt Bend It Like Beckham end up making what Philip French in The Obse- rver calls a “Mills & Boon”? Or as Bradshaw put it: “Chadha can’t see a nuance without giving it the heave-ho.”

Could it be that both these gentlemen are wrong? That if confusion is a pre-requisite to a successful attack, then what all the fluff and dust has done is to obscure the fact that Bride and Prejudice is a hugely political film. In fact it fairly reeks of it.

There is politics in taking Austen to Amritsar. There is politics in the Indian response to the foreigner both in and through the film. In Chadha’s earlier work, Bhaji On the Beach, which is about a bunch of Indian women going to the beach for a day’s excursion, one of the women, a lonely housewife, meets up with a stranger, an elegantly dressed but sad white man. The two spend the day together companionably. But when the time comes to part, the woman snaps back into her familiar conservative mould, surprising and hurting her new found friend with her abruptness.

There is something of this in Bride and Prejudice. Lalita, Chadha’s Elizabeth Bennet, rails sharply against the possibility of foreigners descending with bags of money, ignoring the real India and turning it into an exotic entertainment park. The other way seems to cause her no offence. In Chadha’s world, Indians are everywhere. The Bakshis (the Amritsari Bennets) have relatives in Southall. There is an Indian film showing in a cinema where a fight takes place. Darcy, the film’s eponymous hero who is a hotelier from California, has to do business with a Kohli (Mr Collins of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). Even the Queen of England has a neighbour called Balraj.

And take Chadha’s Liz. One of English literature’s best-loved characters, Elizabeth Bennet is a moderately attractive woman of good sense and quiet strength, cast in relief by her mother, a silly, vulgar and flamboyant woman whose only aim in life is to get her daughters married to wealthy men. Chadha’s Elizabeth however is played by no ordinary woman but the “world’s most beautiful” woman. It has been said that Chadha’s decision to cast the former Miss World was determined by her international appeal. Perhaps she felt that only a woman of her stature could stand up to the haughty gora?

Be that as it may. Lalita is stunningly poised in every frame, make-up and L’Oreal tinted hair untouched by breeze, rain or sun. She is super woman, expert guitar player, singer, graceful dancer, intellectual (compares man eating crudely to a Jackson Pollock painting), cool (playing cricket with urchins). Not only does Ms Perfect demolish Darcy like a smidgeon of chocolate souffle with her wit and wrath about neo-imperialism and frail western bellies but she awes us all into submission.

So when Darcy is finally skewered and set upon a gaily caprisioned elephant at the end the victory is not of Elizabeth Bennet’s quiet unraveling but more of Mrs Bennet (Mrs Bakshi) and Mr Collins’ (Mr Kohli) vulgar trampling. Of a loud, gaudy, “we take what we want” attitude.

In an interview Chadha has said that she felt Austen, like Beckham, was an icon ripe “for subversion”. This is subversion with a vengeance. But it can sound daft when it is sung.