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IT is easy to see why Gurinder Chadha’s films exude so much kinetic energy. In many ways, they reflect the lady herself. Humour, heartiness and expressive shrugs and nods come naturally to her. As she fields rapid-fire questions from journalists, she hurls ripostes right back at them. Interviewing the maker of one of the most successful films to emerge from the UK in the recent years is no walk on the beach. It is more like facing a David Beckham curler from the top of the penalty box. One has no clue which way the ball is headed. You bat an eyelid and chances are that she will bend it around you, quite like the English soccer superstar who lent his name to her previous feature film. That film, Bend It Like Beckham, an intrinsic part of crossover movie folklore, handed the spirited Gurinder Chadha her passport to a global fame and success, both critical and commercial. She is a full-blooded, culturally rooted Punjabi kudi all right. But she is also a British filmmaker by profession and a world citizen by heritage. The story of her cross-cultural cinematic forays is now all set to receive another welcome extension with an unlikely yet seemingly perfect marriage between a timeless literary favourite and a robust present-day narrative idiom.
"I am all set for the world premiere of Bride
& Prejudice on October 4 after which we will party all night
long in London," she discloses. "The next day, we will fly
back to India to prepare for another premiere on October 7." Bride
and Prejudice (Hindi title: Balle Balle! Amritsar to L.A.) is
scheduled for worldwide release the following day. The Indian premiere will either be a ‘political’
event in New Delhi or an out-and-out filmy do in Mumbai. But left to
her, Chadha would prefer to watch Bride & Prejudice at a
public screening in the very Mumbai movie hall where she remembers
watching Raja Hindustani some years ago. "I make films about
Indians living in the UK. I would like to know how Indians here react to
the humour and drama in my new film," she says. She explains, "Bride & Prejudice is designed as a foreign film with a nod to popular Hindi films. It is an attempt to make the Bollywood idiom accessible to the rest of the world." But the film, she adds, is a tribute as much to Bollywood as it is to all the Hollywood musicals that she grew up watching. "Bride & Prejudice has the scale, colour, flamboyance and energy of a Bollywood blockbuster minus the occasional meanderings of its narrative. I have tightened up the drama keeping the sensibilities of global audiences in mind," she says. She did much the same in Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham without incorporating obvious Bollywood elements quite to the extent that she has done in Bride & Prejudice.
But Gurinder is quick to assert that her new film is more than just a simple entertainer. "It is almost subversive, even perhaps political, in the way it tackles the interface between a sharp-witted Indian girl and a wealthy American man. The film questions the position of the US of A in the world," she points out. "This," she asserts, "is the first
time ever that moviegoers across the world will encounter a character
like Lalita Bakshi (the Indianised avatar of Jane Austen’s feisty,
independent-minded Elizabeth Bennett). Hailing from rural Amritsar, she
is an Indian woman with a mind of her own, cool, confident and
assertive. Her exchanges with Darcy (played by Henderson) are full of
quickfire animosity." "There is a gap that exists between India and
America. There are misunderstandings and a tendency to stereotype each
other. Things are not quite so bad between India and Britain because the
two cultures have interacted for 400 years," says Gurinder,
throwing light on why she chose to turn Austen’s male protagonist into
a cocky Yankee. "The crux of Bride & Prejudice is the
love story," she says. "The conflict springs from the
inability of Lalita and Darcy to understand each other. They are too
proud to even try." The world of Jane Austen, Gurinder feels, is very close in its details to contemporary India. "Back then, a woman’s status depended squarely on who she married and her wealth. The conflict between Lizzie Bennett and Will Darcy stemmed from the class divide. In my adaptation, we have made it a sort of political debate," she adds. Although Gurinder did set out to make a Bollywood-style movie – the choice of Anu Malik (music), Saroj Khan (choreography) and Santosh Sivan (cinematography) is evidence of that – she was always going to "tailor it for an international audience". "I represent a world where different cultures collide and I can never make a full-on Bollywood film with the skill of a Karan Johar," she points out. "Bride & Prejudice is a British film." She is, therefore, a tad surprised that her friends in Bollywood – the likes of Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra, feel that Bride & Prejudice is a typical Hindi film. "If anything," Gurinder says, "my film is a homage to Hindi cinema of the 1960s and `70s. For example, Bride & Prejudice has an item number, but it is more a Helen-like song than anything else." Expectedly, where she comes from is what makes Gurinder what she is. "I watched virtually every Hindi film that came to Dominion Cinema in Southall. I saw movies like Guide, Haathi Mere Saathi, Bobby, Jugnu and Purab Aur Paschim. Further away, there was a movie hall that screened the latest Hollywood releases. And on television, I watched a wide array of gritty, realistic British films – Lindsay Anderson, the early Ken Loach, among others. I grew up on an eclectic mix of films and that is reflected in my work," Gurinder says. What separates her from contemporary Bollywood in spirit is the role that she envisages for herself as a filmmaker. "As a director you have to have a position which the audience can take away with them," she ruminates. "You have to be able influence the way people think." Indeed, Gurinder has already begun to distance herself just a wee bit from the east-west syndrome that informs her films. Her husband and co-scriptwriter Paul Mayeda Berges will direct her upcoming adaptation of Chitra Banerjee-Divakaruni’s novel, The Mistress of Spices. "The film that I will helm next will probably be a regular Hollywood production. I have done my bit of balle balle," says Gurinder. The question is, if Gurinder Chadha’s Bride does indeed surmount all Prejudice in the marketplace and does a Bend It Like Beckham, will the world let her slip away quite so easily from what she is obviously so good at: achieving a happy fusion between disparate cultures and telling stories that make geographical borders irrelevant? Seems rather unlikely. |
Life has been a constant whirl for her ever since she
plunged into the production of Bride & Prejudice, starring
Aishwarya Rai and Kiwi hunk Martin Henderson. The film has taken
Gurinder and her unit across half the globe from Amritsar, Goa and
Mumbai to Sedona and downtown Los Angeles. But Chadha isn’t slowing
down just yet.
