Bride and Prejudice

1) I love musicals. When I was a kid, we used to go to musical double features at the repertory movie theaters they had back in the 60s and 70s, the ones that showed a different double feature every day. Take Me Out to the Ballgame and Anchors Aweigh. Oklahoma and Carousel. Singing in the Rain and Bandwagon. I know Singing in the Rain by heart, songs and dialogue. I know that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backward and in high heels. I know the difference between Rogers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe. When M became too old for Blue’s Clues but refused to watch movies with anything sad or violent (thus ruling out all Disney, which I suppose is fine), we turned to musicals: Gene Kelly, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra. Now she almost knows Singing in the Rain by heart.

2) I can’t count the number of times I’ve read Pride and Prejudice. Actually, I can’t count the number of times I’ve read most of Jane Austen’s novels, though I know that I’ve only read Mansfield Park once. I’m pretty up on Jane Austen movies too. I like the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee Sense and Sensibility for its intelligent screenplay; I like Persuasion for its visual realism; and I love Clueless for showing how relevant the basic premises of Austen’s social satire remain. And, yes, I think Austen was a feminist.

3) I always knew I’d go to India someday, and then I did. My parents went to India before I was born and so did several of their friends (it was the 60s, people went to India, at least a certain brand of middle-class white people…though I will say for my parents that they went in the early 60s, way before the Beatles, on a grant to study something or other). Anyway, I just assumed that one grew up and went to India. I did think that one grew up, found a great boyfriend, and went to India with him, but when the boyfriend didn’t show up, I went by myself. If I start writing about India, I will totally hijack this post, so I won’t go there, but I will say that I saw my first Bollywood movie in Hardwar and thought it was ridiculous but lots of fun. (Then I came back from India and read Edward Said and realized that my desire for India was totally Orientalist, but the thing about desire is that it refuses to obey political analyses, even when it recognizes their truth.)

4) I loved Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha’s first indie hit and her mainstream break-out movie (and here I’m tempted to write about the huge fight L and I had about feminism, commodity culture, mainstream cinema, and Bend It Like Beckham, but if I go there I will end up writing about all the fights he and I have had over the last 25 years, including the most recent one which had us screaming at each other in a bar in Berkeley two years ago, and that would definitely hijack this post).

5) I’m always willing to see a romantic comedy, and I’m generally willing to put away my politics for silly movies (except when I’m not, as in the case of Being John Malkovich, where the gratuitous scene of his wife in the cage turned me off the movie altogether, though I’d enjoyed it up till then).

Thus, if anyone was going to like Bride and Prejudice, Gurinder Chadha’s silly but enjoyable new film that takes Pride and Prejudice to contemporary India, London, and L.A., with a large dollop of Bollywood musical absurdity, it was going to be me. And, indeed, I liked it a lot.