This sounds like a winning formula — only it’s usually Shakespeare’s work that gets a twist. From Film Gives Jane Austen a Bollywood Twist:
A middle-class family. Four marriageable daughters. Tension between romantic love and social duty. They’re elements fit for a Bollywood epic ? and the plot of “Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen’s sharply observed portrait of English society at the turn of the 19th century.
Austen aficionados and Indian film fans alike gathered in London’s West End Monday for the premiere of British director Gurinder Chadha’s “Bride and Prejudice,” which transposes Austen’s comedy of manners to modern-day India.
It is, Chadha says, a perfect match.
“Once I started adapting the novel, I was convinced Jane Austen was Indian in a previous life,” said Chadha, whose last film was the cross-cultural soccer comedy “Bend it Like Beckham.”
Dozens of fans gathered outside London’s Palladium Theater — bedecked for the evening with orange and pink ribbons — to see the film’s stars including former Miss World and current Bollywood leading light Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson, the film’s leading man.
“Bride and Prejudice,” which opens in Britain and India on Friday, transforms Austen’s Bennet family into the Bakshis of Amritsar. Rai plays spirited small-town girl Lalita Bakshi, drawn into a sparring relationship with Mr. Darcy, the wealthy heir to an American hotel chain, while courted by a pompous accountant (Nitin Ganatra).