Bride and Prejudice

Bride And Prejudice is a combination of Bollywood style and Hollywood musical comedy

Herald rating: * * * *

Jane Austen's novel, re-directed by Gurinder Chadha (What's Cooking? and Bend It Like Beckham) and starring one-time Shortland Streeter Martin Henderson alongside India's 1994 Miss World, Aishwarya Rai, gets a Bollywood-style makeover to become Hollywood's first sari-ripper.

Will Darcy (Henderson) is a rich young New York hotelier. He's in India because Balraj (Naveen Andrews), a mate from London, is best man at a wedding.

The Bakshi family is friendly with the bride's family, and Mrs Bakshi (Nadira Babbar) hopes her four daughters can meet husbands at the shindig. Balraj and the oldest daughter, Jaya Bakshi (Namrata Shirodkar), fall for each other at first sight. Darcy and Lalita (Rai) don't, mainly because of his cultural ineptness, lack of tact, dislike of arranged marriages and preoccupation with business.

Oh dear: Lalita may have to obey mum's orders and marry Mr Kholi (Nitin Chandra Ganatra), a visiting Hollywood mogul.

But this is a combination of Bollywood style and Hollywood musical comedy, so everything will turn out in the end. It'll just take the cast to break into song and dance at every opportunity, a series of unlikely plot devices and deviations - and situations, from Hong Kong action sequences to a Mexican restaurant - and a tandoor full of fun.

The fun continues on a DVD filled with a whack of extras. Chadha and co-writer Paul Mayeda Berges run the commentary and the director takes charge of the making-of.

Henderson and Rai get a feature apiece to heap praise on their boss. After the usual production design, makeup and choreography backgrounders, there's a lavish deleted musical number, behind-the-scenes clips and outtakes, plus red-carpet moments from the London premiere.

* Bride And Prejudice is available on DVD, video rental August 17