Bride and Prejudice

My neighbor hadn't gotten around to watching a movie he checked out from the library, so he brought it over so everyone could fail to watch it together. The flatmate not on vacation said, "Oh! Bride and Prejudice! I wanted to see this one!" Apparently it's done by at least some of the folk who did Bend It Like Beckham, which was an alright movie. And it has award nominations.

Well, if it's so great (and no one else is going to watch it anyway), I thought I might watch it.

To date, no Bollywood movie that I know of has ever tried to claim that it was natural at any stage of Indian life for everyone to get up and start singing dancing in unison, choreographed and in just the right ratio of men and women. This movie would have me believe that one of the dance numbers was natural. Okay, that was probably just trying too hard to deal with people suddenly singing for an audience that doesn't get many new musicals anymore.

The movie itself if about a couple rich friends, one who is Indian and decided to go home so that mom can find him a bride. His friend falls in love with her sister and she with him but neither one will admit it. This is before they've even seen each other close up. Once talking she decides he's boorish while he finds her intelligent and outspoken (which she is sort of presented as, especially outspoken). As he proves that he is boorish, but honestly boorish, she apparently decides he's not so bad and all is right in the end.

Whatever. It is probably banking too much on the viewer believing this is Pride and Prejudice with the details changed. It will follow along to the prescribed ending regardless of how well motivated the characters seem to be along the way and these characters are not motivated at all. In fact, there was plenty of motivation away from the prescribed ending, yet somehow it gets there.

The background story with the friend meeting a woman his mom has found for him with conflict in the form of a boorish American friend who convinces him the woman is being forced by her mother that is eventually resolved is a better motivated story than the main one and it's not much more than a few facts.