The Frame

When discussing a film adaptation of a literary work, one question inevitably arises: “How does it compare with the book?” And generally, the answer is a variant of “the book is better.” This exchange could be between Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter fans, members of Oprah’s book club, film reviewers, literary critics, or academics. Although the question and answer in and of themselves do not intrinsically mean that the film is being judged based on its faithfulness to the book, that is most often the case. The assumption that a film adaptation’s primary goal is to faithfully recreate its source is ingrained at nearly all levels of literate society. Even film studies scholars, who have worked hard over the past fifty years to claim for cinema the same cultural appreciation that is granted to literature, tend to fall into fidelity-based discourse when faced with cinematic adaptation. Thus, films that recreate the original setting, dialogue, and characterization of the novel in exquisite detail are often considered the best adaptations, such as the six-hour 1995 BBC version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Yet, despite the fact that Austen fans and film critics alike have embraced the 1995 rendition of Austen’s novel, no fewer than three adaptations of Pride and Prejudice have been made in the ten years since it was first televised. A few critics have wondered whether or not we really need any more adaptations of the novel. If the purpose of a film adaptation is merely to provide a faithful visual and auditory companion to the book, then why indeed continue to adapt a novel that has already been made into an almost perfectly faithful film? One answer, of course, is to exploit the popularity of the book—film studios assume, for example, that a Jane Austen adaptation has a built-in audience. In addition, adapting a two-hundred-year-old novel, now in the public domain, does not require the production company to secure expensive and restrictive legal rights in order to make the film, as adapting a contemporary novel would, therefore studios have perfectly good financial reasons to return again and again to classic novels as sources.

However, such an economic answer is not very encouraging to the study of film as art, and indeed, does not fully explain the several recent Austen adaptations that either modernize Austen’s story to the present day or significantly modify the original novel, even to the point of alienating the very fans they seek. A 2003 version of Pride and Prejudice sets the story among twentieth century Mormons in Salt Lake City. Director Amy Heckerling transposes Emma to a Beverly Hills high school in her 1995 film Clueless. Modern-day India becomes the scene for director Gurinder Chadha’s 1995 populist Bride and Prejudice, as well as a South Indian version of Sense and Sensibility, titled Kandukondain Kandukondain (I Have Found It in Tamil), released in 2000. Perhaps most controversial of all, director Patricia Rozema’s 1999 version of Mansfield Park sparked outrage among Austen fans for a number of reasons: though she retains the novel’s nineteenth-century setting, Rozema conflates the character of Fanny Price with Austen herself (as revealed in Austen’s journals and letters), follows recent Austen poststructuralist criticism in emphasizing the colonial slavery that supports life at Mansfield Park, and plays up the film’s sensuality far beyond what is overtly in the novel. It is clear that these filmmakers are not even attempting to make purely faithful films. Yet both Mansfield Park and Clueless in particular are very well-made films, and both continue to garner much more critical attention than traditionally faithful renditions, suggesting that the status of fidelity as the only acceptable mode of adaptation must be reconsidered.

In Novels into Film (1957), the first book-length academic treatment of adaptation, George Bluestone lays out some fundamental principles of adaptation, taking into account the differences between the two mediums and the importance of translating a novel into a film-specific form in order for an adaptation to be successful. However, more recent theorists point out that Bluestone continues to give the novel priority over the film, and thus makes film “seem belated, middlebrow, or culturally inferior” (Naremore 6). Brian McFarlane points out that the fidelity mode of adaptation is doomed from the outset, since it “depends on the notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a single, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some sense violated or tampered with” (McFarlane 8). Since any two readers may come away from the same book with different meanings, and certainly with different mental images of what the book “looks like,” a filmmaker who expects to please every reader is bound to be disappointed. Robert Stam suggests that explicitly viewing a film adaptation as one of many possible readings of the source work is a more helpful approach: “An adaptation, in this sense, is less an attempted resuscitation of an originary word than a turn in an ongoing dialogic process.” (Stam, “Beyond” 64) In other words, an adaptation is part of a conversation—the same intertextual conversation that has been going on between books for centuries, as when Virgil used The Iliad and The Odyssey as jumping-off points for the Aeneid, or when James Joyce recast The Odyssey into a single day in one Dublin man’s life (Stam, “Beyond” 66). Films are often excluded from this cycle of intertextuality, and treated as though their purpose is a bastardized way to experience literature for a culture that no longer reads—a sort of visual Cliff-Notes.

Stam’s healthier approach rescues film from a second-place cultural status, opens literature to include the contributions of the cinematic form, and allows filmmakers more freedom to exercise their own creativity. Some may suggest that this freedom is not, in fact, warranted—that the filmmaker should not have the right to reinvent their source, as Rozema does with Mansfield Park. However, such a position indicates a double-standard, because, as mentioned above, books have been borrowing from each other for centuries. As Stam points out: “The ideal of a single, definitive, faithful adaptation does not hold sway in any other media. In the theatre, conceptual reinterpretation and performative innovation—for example, in Orson Welles’s modern-dress Julius Caesar or his Haiti-set ‘Voodoo’ Macbeth—are seen as normal, even prized” (Stam, “Theory” 15). Even beyond the creative license taken in staging that Stam mentions, theatrical shows like West Side Story and My Fair Lady truly adapt and modify their sources. Hardly anyone would claim that these theatrical adaptations represent an affront to the original work, nor would anyone say that Joyce somehow “betrayed” Homer in writing Ulysses, or that Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur is a lesser work because he modified his sources. Rather, they are celebrated because their works are creative and innovative. Only filmmakers, then, are castigated for doing what all other artists are praised for—adding their own sensibilities and visions to the literary conversation. Writer/director Alain Resnais once said: “Simply adapting a novel without changing it is like reheating a meal” (qtd. in Stam, “Theory” 16). So far from assuming that the film industry’s work is done once one definitively faithful adaptation has been released, the critical reading mode of adaptation allows for and even encourages many different adaptations, each filtered through the particular point of view of its respective filmmaker.

Not all critics working on adaptation theory are quite as polemical as Stam; McFarlane regards fidelity as one possible and perfectly acceptable type of adaptation, though he does wish to see fidelity criticism devalued from its present privileged status. He states that it is important to discern which type of adaptation the filmmaker is attempting—only then can the critic begin to determine whether or not the adaptation has been successful. Many theorists, including Dudley Andrew and narratologist Gérard Genette have formulated categories of adaptation based on varying degrees of faithfulness; one of the most accessible set of categories comes from Geoffrey Wagner, who postulates transposition as faithful adaptation, commentary wherein the “original is taken and either purposely or inadvertently altered in some respect,” and analogy, which represents “a fairly considerable departure for the sake of making another work of art” (qtd. in McFarlane 10-11). As McFarlane concludes: “There are many kinds of relations which may exist between film and literature, and fidelity is only one—and rarely the most exciting” (McFarlane 11).

Taking the idea of adaptation as critical reading a step further, Christopher Orr suggests that intertextual criticism sees the source text as a resource: “The issue is not whether the adapted film is faithful to its source, but rather how the choice of a specific source and how the approach to that source serve the film’s ideology” (qtd. in McFarlane 10). Many literary critics see the idea of literature as a resource as a threat—indeed, film itself has been seen as a threat to literature since its invention, and much of the criticism on adaptation has been based on an assumption of a bitter rivalry between literature and film, as though the existence of one meant the imminent demise of the other when really, each art stands to gain through exposure to the other. Indeed, theorist Béla Balázs, who also happened to be both a novelist and a filmmaker, suggested that a filmmaker “may use the existing work of art merely as raw material” (qtd. in Beja 80). One of the most compelling objections to using literature as a resource for film is the possibility that the film’s audience will be misled into a false understanding of the book. However, this is not an intrinsic problem with adaptation as much as a problem of audiences being used to spoon-fed adaptations dictated by goals of fidelity. If Stam, McFarlane, and others are correct and fidelity should be devalued as a criterion in adaptation criticism, then critics and filmmakers must lead the way, teaching audiences that watching the film is not the same thing as reading the book, but that experiencing both can be more valuable than either on its own. A second objection is based on the mercenary, unfeeling connotation of the word “use,” which suggests a betrayal by a lover. Perhaps rather than thinking of the literature-as-resource approach as a filmmaker wringing the life from a literary source and then tossing the used source away carelessly, it would be more helpful to see this style of adaptation as a recognition that the original story has value even beyond what the original author envisioned. Certainly Shakespeare could not have foreseen that Romeo and Juliet would one day be applicable to New York City street gangs, yet Steven Sondheim saw the relevance and created West Side Story. In this way, the original becomes even more pervasive and influential through its “use” as a resource.

I have been drawing my examples from the novels of Jane Austen and their adaptations, simply because there have been so many in the past decade, many of them very faithful to the book (the 1995 and 2005 versions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion), others very free in their adaptation. Clueless and Mansfield Park have already received a fair amount of critical attention, and Mansfield Park in particular exemplifies the idea of a film as a critical reading of the source text, since it does, in fact, incorporate postcolonial and feminist theory into the story itself. However, the Austen adaptation that best displays intertextuality is Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 film Bride and Prejudice. Chadha reimagines Pride and Prejudice in terms of an American-Indian culture clash, infusing Austen’s novel with elements borrowed from the mainstream Indian cinema, commonly called “Bollywood.” The term “Bollywood” is a mixture of “Hollywood” and “Bombay,” the city (now called Mumbai) in which the Hindi film industry is centered. Combining Bollywood with the South Indian cinema centered in Chennai, India has the largest film industry in the world, producing nearly twice as many films per year as Hollywood does, and grossing about $3.6 billion in worldwide sales annually, compared to Hollywood’s $2.6 billion (Kasbekar 181). Much of this worldwide popularity is due to the diaspora of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), especially in British Commonwealth countries. Recent years have seen an upswing in the number of Indian films specifically aimed at this diasporic population, such as Kal Ho Naa Ho, which is set entirely in New York City. Meanwhile, NRIs like Gurinder Chadha (she is of Indian heritage, but has lived in London from the age of two) are approaching the question of what it means to be Indian in an increasingly globalized world.

In Bride and Prejudice, the Bennets become the Bakshis, a middle-class farming family in Amritsar, India. Balraj and Kiran Bingley, NRIs living in London, arrive in Amritsar for a wedding, bringing along with them Balraj’s American friend Will Darcy, heir to a multi-million dollar hotel chain. From Will’s first meeting with Lalita Bakshi (the Elizabeth character), the two draw battle lines between Will’s perception of India as backward and Lalita’s perception of Will as an arrogant outsider. He struggles with the Indian clothes he wears, refuses to participate in the unfamiliar Indian dances, is discontented with his hotel (the best in town), incredulous that business can be conducted in India at all with its lack of infrastructure, and believes that arranged marriages are weird. Lalita takes these criticisms of her country as a personal affront, and her preconceived opinion of Will as an insensitive Westerner leads her to misinterpret everything he says. When Will suggests that his interest in buying a hotel in the resort town of Goa proves he does not think India is beneath him, Lalita retorts “You think this is India?” referring to the touristy resort area and disdaining the tourist trade which threatens to turn India into a theme park. In order to win her, Will must learn to respect all of India, not just those parts which most approximate the United States.

When Johnny Wickham arrives, Lalita is immediately taken with him because he seems to respect the Indian way of life, and does everything that Will fails to do. He tells Lalita the great thing about India is “you don’t have to have money to enjoy this place, and if you have money, you never get to see the real India,” a direct reference to Will’s wealth. Johnny’s attitude is contrasted what that of Mrs. Darcy (Lady Catherine de Bourgh, now Will’s mother), who declines to consider visiting India unless she can stay in a four-star hotel. When Johnny visits the Bakshi family, he greets Mrs. Bakshi with a “namaste,” the traditional Indian greeting/blessing, and that evening enters wholeheartedly into Indian dancing. However, to assume that Lalita’s desire that Westerners understand her country means that she herself is completely in line with its traditions would be a mistake. She is clearly not willing to submit to the traditional idea of marriage in India, with its connotations of a subservient wife. She faces this option in the person of Mr. Kholi, the Mr. Collins character, who has returned from Los Angeles to find a bride from among his extended family. But Kholi expects a bride who will cater to his every whim and fawn over him because of his million-dollar home and his connections with the business elite. Lalita will have nothing to do with this, preferring to go against tradition and remain single and childless unless she finds love. Of course, this is not necessary, since Johnny is revealed as less than honorable and Lalita and Will both learn to overcome their respective prejudice and pride as they grow to love each other.

An examination of the films Chadha has directed up to and including Bride and Prejudice reveals her preoccupation with Indian cultural identity and the relations between Indians and Westerners. Bhaji on the Beach (1993) follows a group of Anglo-Indian women as they go on vacation, dealing with issues of generational and racial identity, while both A Nice Arrangement (1994) and Chadha’s breakout hit Bend It Like Beckham (2002) deal with the attempts of traditional Indian families in London to keep their daughters from becoming too Anglicized—in the latter case, from playing soccer and dating the English captain of her team. It is important to note the focus of Chadha’s earlier films because, as the auteur theory suggests, many directors act as the author of their films, infusing all or most of their work with their own personal vision. The auteur theory was originated by film critics writing for the Paris film journal Cahiers du cinema in the 1950s, several of whom, including Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, would become directors themselves and usher in the French New Wave. Truffaut’s 1954 article Une certaine tendance du cinéma française posited a politique des auteurs, or a politic of the author—the author being the creative mind behind a film, usually the director. The Cahiers critics did not limit auteurism only to original scenarios, either—many of the directors they admired, including Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Nicholas Ray, worked primarily from novelistic sources, as did the Cahiers critics when they turned to filmmaking themselves. Although the specific formulation of the auteur theory espoused by the Cahiers critics is no longer in vogue, the idea that a director is the author of a film, and that there are often strands of similarity running throughout a given director’s work has been quite influential. Chadha does either write or cowrite the scripts for her films, one of the Cahiers critics’ criteria for an auteur, and her concern with Indian culture and its intersection with Western life runs throughout her oeuvre. Hence Bride and Prejudice belongs to Chadha much more directly than it belongs to Jane Austen. Allowing directors to be the authors of their films allows them also to have the freedom to present their own reading of a source text, or to use the source text as a starting point for their own vision.

In this case, Chadha takes the story of Pride and Prejudice, laden with class consciousness and misunderstandings based on social prejudices, and relates it to her own concern with cross-cultural communication and identity, as well as the social issues still facing India today. Choosing to place Austen’s story in India solves a difficulty that all Austen adaptations must face due to the drastically changing social and gender conditions in the Western world since her time. Even the most faithful period adaptations must convey to the audience why the women of Sense and Sensibility cannot just get jobs and why Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are so conscious of the differences in their social position. Period films, however, can rely to some extent on the audience recognizing that different eras have different standards. The modernizing filmmaker does not have that crutch and must decide how to portray classes in a largely egalitarian society, at least in Great Britain or the United States. India, on the other hand, shares a number of social characteristics with Regency England. A second reason to bring Pride and Prejudice to India is that “the themes of Jane Austen’s novel are so pertinent to contemporary India,” as Chadha states in an interview on the Bride and Prejudice DVD. Indian marriages are usually arranged by the family, take place within the proper caste, and a wife is in a lower position than her husband, both culturally and legally. Despite the fact that her identity is subsumed into that of her husband, marriage is an incredibly important part of an Indian woman’s life. Just as in Austen’s England, most women cannot own a significant amount of property or inherit land in India—laws supporting equal inheritance exist, but they are not universally followed (Henderson 126). Laura Reznick faults Bride and Prejudice for its failure to portray the very real financial difficulties that face the Bennet family if the daughters do not marry well (Reznick 94). In the novel, the Bennet estate is entailed to Mr. Collins, leaving little or no inheritance for the five girls, who do not have any possibility of earning a living themselves as the Bakshi girls do. Yet, even though opportunities for women in the workplace in India are growing, working women earn much less than men in the same jobs: in skilled professional circles, a woman’s wages are no higher than 80% of a man’s, but in the dominant agricultural sector they earn only half of what a man would (Dunlop 4). Thus, even though Lalita works on the family farm, her wage-earning ability is likely half that of a man, explaining why her ability (and desire) to work does not necessarily preclude marriage as her best financial option. Other critics have pointed out that Bride and Prejudice tends to present an image of a carefree and colorful middle-class India, despite the social inequalities that actually exist. This criticism could be leveled at Bollywood film in general, which is anxious to convey India’s upward mobility, especially to its diasporic audience. In fact, Bride and Prejudice does contain a scene in which Mrs. Bakshi laments not moving to American when they had a chance; now they are stuck in India with “an old house, an old farm, and new bills”—bills which are overflowing the end of the table as Mr. Bakshi and Lalita work their way through them. A similar scene was cut from earlier in the film, probably to avoid redundancy.

The Bollywood elements of Bride and Prejudice are what really set it apart from other adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. As the brief summary above shows, Chadha has not actually deviated very much from Austen’s basic story. Minor details such as changing Lady Catherine deBough into Will’s mother streamline the relationships, while the intensification of the Wickham-Georgina relationship to include pregnancy reflects modern American sensibilities regarding sexual conduct. In a very real sense, Chadha’s film adapts Bollywood to Austen (and a Western audience) much more than it adapts Austen to Bollywood. Chadha is not a Bollywood filmmaker, but growing up in London in an NRI family exposed her to a lot of Bollywood film in her childhood (London imports a lot of films from India, due to its large NRI population). Her status as an outsider to Bollywood allows her to draw on Bollywood traditions while also mildly poking fun at its conventions. Bollywood films are something of an acquired taste—many Westerners find them overblown and cheesy, but there is something undeniably delightful about them whether we want to admit it or not. A typical Bollywood film runs over three hours long, includes generic conventions from slapstick comedy to melodrama to action (yes, all in the same film), and infuses even the most unlikely stories with long musical numbers. These musical numbers often involve dream-like states wherein the characters are transported to different exotic locales; the characters are also often joined by backup dancers who appear from nowhere. The songs are in Hindi, and are often not translated by subtitles on DVD releases—the words to the songs are usually poetic, passionate, and melodramatic, but do not further the story in any way.
Sensuality is portrayed by drenched saris and seductive dancing, but almost never through physical sex or even kissing, though recent films such as Salaam Namaste! are breaking ground in this direction. According to a Sixty Minutes interview with lead actress Aishwarya Rai, the chaste nature of Bollywood on-screen romance mirrors a general lack of public displays of affection in India—another social constraint which fits quite well with Jane Austen’s own Regency England. Chadha subtly highlights the difference between Eastern and Western sexual mores in Bride and Prejudice by reversing the extent of Wickham’s dalliances from Austen’s novel. In the novel, he merely runs away with Georgina and intimacy is not assumed, whereas when he and Lydia run off, it is clear they are living together and must, according to social propriety, get married. In Bride and Prejudice, however, the affair between Johnny and Georgie leads to pregnancy, but he and Lakhi are found before anything untoward can happen. Simply running off with a consenting girl would not be as big a concern in the United States as it was in nineteenth-century England, but premarital sex for an Indian girl even today would be much more scandalous, yet a shotgun wedding would be a tough sell to modern audiences, especially for such an upbeat film as Bride and Prejudice. For Bride and Prejudice, Chadha takes the basic conventions and translates them into a form she thinks will be more accessible to Western audiences, partly by reducing the length and normalizing the genre to musical comedy, but also through her conscious use of intertextual references to both Indian and Western cinema traditions.

Christine Geraghty has applied Robert Stam’s theory of intertextuality to Bride and Prejudice, but she believes that Chadha ultimately weakens her film, compromising both Bollywood tradition and Austen’s novel. As she points out, reviewers of the film are sometimes unsure whether Chadha intends to homage or parody Bollywood (Philip French in The Observer), yet many acknowledge that her admittedly populist approach ultimately pleases (Carrey Rickey in The Philadelphia Enquirer). Certainly Chadha enjoys Bollywood film, but she is also well aware of its clichés, and she does not hesitate to use them for intentional comic effect. The love song which transports its lovers to unreal locations is replaced by a love song during which Will and Lalita cavort in fountains and on California beaches, and travel to the Grand Canyon in his helicopter. Even more tongue-in-cheek, one of the outtakes played during the closing credits shows Chadha herself and cowriter Paul Mayeda Berges dancing through the same fountains and sharing a kiss—something Will and Lalita never do in the film, in keeping with the conventions of both Bollywood and Jane Austen adaptations. The backup singers who appear from nowhere are transformed into a black gospel choir and choreographed surfers. If it seems a bit over the top, it is meant to be. Aishwayra Rai, as Lalita, is sometimes criticized for her broad acting style, but that again, is part of the Bollywood tradition. Philip French of The Observer claims that “Chadha is trying to have her chapatti and eat it.” However, in this film about East/West culture clash, it is only natural that Chadha allow the Eastern and Western acting styles to clash as much as their ideologies.

Through her amalgamation of cinematic traditions, as well as the content of the story, Chadha suggests a balanced approach of mutual understanding between the two cultures, each of which has something to offer as well as elements that may need to be left behind. India needs to revise its treatment of women in light of Western equality, but America must refrain from feeling superior over a still-developing country. The film presents a variety of cultural positions, some healthier than others, from the stereotypical extremes of Mrs. Darcy as the worst example of the American autocrat to Mrs. Bakshi as the ultimate Indian mama who only wants her daughters married well. Non-Resident Indians (or NRIs) Mr. Kholi, and Balraj and Kiran Bingley, all of whom were born in India but now reside in London or LA, present the possible reactions of those who literally straddle the cultural divide. Balraj is the most attuned to both his London setting and his Indian heritage, accepting both as part of himself and equally comfortable in both spheres, just as Charles Bingley moved between Pemberley and Meryton with relative ease in the novel. Kiran retains a conception of herself as Indian, but is disdainful toward India itself and the Indians who live there, claiming they “lack sophistication.” Mr. Kholi, on the other hand, does everything he can to shed his Indian identity. He continually uses what he thinks is current American slang in an effort to be “cool,” he prefers American hip-hop to the Indian Garba dances, and he proudly proclaims his status as a green-card holder. In fact, his only problem with America is the fact that the Indian girls there are too liberated and will not serve his ego the way he thinks a good Indian wife should. He is wholly self-interested, and his failure to hold on to the traditions of India or to embrace more than his superficial idea of America depicts the absolute wrong way to cross cultural boundaries. The central couple of Will and Lalita finally represent the balanced picture of a West that appreciates the East fused with an East that embraces both modernity and tradition.

As Geraghty mentions, Chadha gleans intertextual fodder from British sitcoms (in the portrayal of Indian mothers) and British and American movie musicals as well as from Bollywood itself. This is clearly evident in the songs used in Bride and Prejudice, which some have found uneven; however, in their style, usage, and progression, the songs integrally support the film’s cross-cultural theme. All of the songs retain the Bollywood convention of play-back singing, meaning that the actors lipsynch to a pre-recorded track sung by someone else. Play-back singers are celebrities in their own right in India, and reducing the practice by calling it “dubbing,” as several less-than-sympathetic reviewers have, is misinformed and somewhat condescending. The opening song “Kites Without Strings,” part of the wedding celebration which opens the film, is completely Bollywood in rhythm, melody, pitch, style, content, and language—in fact, it is the only song in the film not in English. The high pitched female part, vocal runs and lilting rhythms are distinctively Bollywood, and the lyrics are a verbal sparring match between groups of men and women, a type of song very common in Indian film. The next song, “Marriage Has Come to Town,” is performed by the entire village about the bride of this wedding. In its growth from trio to full production number, it draws generally on big-scale Hollywood musicals and specifically on the British musical Oliver!, in which virtually every song, no matter how intimate it starts, turns into an extravaganza involving all available extras. It also has Bollywood pitch and rhythm, but as the story pushes toward multiculturalism, it is sung in English and has far fewer vocal flourishes. When Lalita’s sisters tease her over Mr. Kholi in the broadly comic “No Life Without Wife,” the egotistical Kholi becomes as supremely ridiculous as Austen’s Mr. Collins in a way immediately recognizable to audiences brought up on American musicals like Grease—the performance of the song is especially reminiscent of Grease’s “Look at Me, I’m Sandra Dee.” First performed at a Goa beach party by Ashanti as bhangra-infused hip-hop, “Show Me to Love” is reprised twice toward the end of the film as a lyrical ballad, combining Indian instrumentation and pitch with Western melody and style. The Ashanti version of this number may seem like an out-of-place set piece, but it, too, draws on a Bollywood tradition of including nightclub-set numbers by popular cabaret singers—a tradition which has nearly died out now, but was very common in the 1960s and 1970s, during Chadha’s childhood. By the time Will and Lalita learn to love each other, the music itself has married East and West. The finale reprises “Marriage Has Come To Town” as Will and Lalita and Balraj and Jaya share a double wedding.
Ultimately, Geraghty believes that the very intentionality of Chadha’s intertextual references defeats her own purpose, making the film feel ponderous rather than spontaneous (Geraghty 167). She implies that intertextuality is only valid if it is inferred by the reader rather than included by the director. This suggestion is similar to ones by film theorists that film noir was a cinematic style restricted to the post-WWII era, when certain films seemed to use similar existential themes and low-lighting effects unconsciously, or that the auteur theory applies only to filmmakers who managed to imprint their films with their personal visions despite working within the restrictive Hollywood studio system. While there is certainly a specific delight for a reader in finding unconscious intertextuality, that does not necessarily mean that it is invalid when applied consciously. Taking this point of view merely leads back to the literature-film double standard—Umberto Eco’s use of ideas culled from the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges in his novels Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose is hardly accidental, nor is Shakespeare’s reliance on and modification of both earlier tales and history itself.

Nearly everything in Chadha’s film is intentional, including its populism. Though reviewers of Bride and Prejudice are split nearly evenly between those who recommend it and those who do not (according to Rotten Tomatoes.com), nearly all of them are agreed that the film is a crowd-pleaser, and many of them enjoyed watching it whether they ultimately felt it deserved critical praise or not. Bollywood cinema itself is rather populist, putting out hundreds of films per year full of bright colors, celebratory dances, pop songs, and happy endings; this is one element of Indian film that Chadha has not diminished at all. If anything, she has emphasized it, reducing as far as possible the spectre of poverty facing Austen’s Bennets and the fear of social disgrace from Johnny’s relationship with Lakhi. These elements are still there, but most of all, Chadha wants her audience to have a good time—a stylistic choice that could be seen as lacking the proper seriousness necessary to be a “good” film, especially a good adaptation of a classic novel. Yet, by focusing on fun, Chadha does realize an element of Jane Austen’s novels that is often not clearly brought out in other adaptations, though other Austen films have certainly better captured the desperation attendant on a family with only daughters. Kamilla Elliott refers to this selective adapting as the de(re)composing model, in which novel and film are decomposed, merged, and recomposed to form a new creation: “Many so-called ‘unfaithful’ adaptations […] are condemned as unfaithful because critics read only one way—from novel to film—and find that the film has made changes. But […] these ‘infidelities’ represent rejections of certain parts of the novel in favor of others, not total departures” (Elliott 157). Writing specifically about Pride and Prejudice, Brian McFarlane complains that his students always seem to focus on “Jane Austen’s moral insights, the wisdom of choosing marriage partners with care, and the like,” and points out that while these elements are certainly present in her novels, there may be another reason to read Austen: “Perhaps it doesn’t sound serious enough to come right out and say that this novel is enormous fun, that one might value it because it is wonderfully witty and entertaining as it goes about its more serious business” (McFarlane “Something Old” 7). Chadha does give us only the entertaining side of Austen, but in an age when an episode of Veronica Mars, one of the most intelligent shows on television, rejects Pride and Prejudice as irrelevant and boring, perhaps that is the very side we need.

WORKS CITED

This paper originated in December 2006 for Bibliography and Research Methods at Baylor University.