Gurinder Chadha loves to support her desi community, even if it means turning a blind eye to Southall shopkeepers selling pirated DVDs of her movies.
“Off and on, (I) go down the shops and buy baingan (eggplant) or whatever with my mum,” she says.
“And the shopkeepers are smiling. And the little girls passing by, asking for autographs, you know on the brown paper bags that you buy stuff in.
“And the people in the community see me very much as part of the community. And these sardars, especially these Afghanistan sardars, they have all the stalls. And they all have pirate copies of my films, down the street. And I am looking at them. And they look at me, (laughing sheepishly).
“And I say to them, ‘You know this is illegal. What are you doing? I can go to the police you know.’ And they say, ‘Behnji. Tussi aine paise bana liye. Sannu bhi banan do na.’ (Sisterji, you have made so much money. Let us make some too.) To my face they say this. And I say, to hell with piracy. It’s a bad thing, but what can you do. In a way it’s that people can’t wait to see your work.”
Sitting in a downtown Toronto hotel room, Chadha laughs at her observations. She’s dressed in a black shirt and jeans. The shirt proclaims, ‘one Funk’n desi. A pair of gold baalis (hoop-like traditional Indian earrings) peep through her shag-short-cropped hair.
“(It’s) Desi Wear,” says Chadha. “Toronto-based group of designers that I am proud of supporting. I am very proud of what they are doing. I like to wear their stuff in England, in the U.S., everywhere.”
Chadha was in town to promote the North American release of Bride and Prejudice. The movie will premier in America on February 11, and will open across North America on February 25.
After a day filled with interviews, Chadha was tired. And it didn’t end there. In the evening, after a public screening of Bride and Prejudice at the Paramount Theatre, Chadha was available for a Q&A session with the audience. But she’s ready with a laugh, and humours the endless questions about why Bollywood, why Aishwarya, why Jane Austen. Even, why Bride and Prejudice.
The success of Bend It Like Beckham, which also launched the career of Parminder Nagra in the Emmy-series ER, had people waiting for Chadha’s next film.
Supporters of Bride and Prejudice say it’s a great film and has given the first hook for Bollywood queen bee Aishwarya Rai’s global recognition. Rai has been on 60 Minutes and the Late Show with David Letterman in anticipation of the North American release of the movie.
But Rai was on the cover of Time magazine and on the Cannes red carpet long before, and news of her role of a prostitute along side Meryl Streep in upcoming movie Chaos also predates the current frenzy.
Bride and Prejudice also has its critics, in U.K. and India. To wit, here’s Shobhaa De in the national daily Times of India: “The film employs the worst pre-packaged cliches about ‘natives’ letting their hair down at assorted weddings, as a classy, uptight American gulps in embarrassment while discreetly eying the pale and lifeless daughter of a middle-class family in Amritsar. Of course, there are shots of the Golden Temple to thrill the cockles of Britain’s nostalgic Sikh community. What? No snakes and snake charmers? Relax, there’s a hilarious Cobra dance. Sorry, the film’s a dud.”
In England, Cosmo Landesman sniffed: “Chadha seems to think that as long as you pile on the songs, splatter the screen in bright colours and have lots of men with fluorescent white teeth gyrating with pretty women, that will do,” he wrote in The Sunday Times, and went on to say Rai had “the well-groomed, doe-eyed prettiness of an air hostess.”
But Chadha is unfazed by the criticism, sliding the blame on the perception of Bollywood as the fantastical Indian film industry and its absurdist song and dance sequences.
“And I think it also has to do with Aishwarya,” she say. “Either people like her or don’t like her, in India. And I think that the other thing is also that people, a lot of Indians don’t really respect Bollywood. And quite right too, because a lot of it is s***.
“But I think there are some wonderful directors and some wonderful movies. There are movies that I grew up with and I respect people like Yash Chopra, Raj Kapoor, Manoj Kumar. And they are fine filmmakers. And so the film I made is referencing their work.
“I saw a lot (of Bollywood movies) in the late 60’s and 70’s in the cinemas in Southall. And then everything went to video. And then, I never even bothered watching movies again. I think Bobby was the last really big movie in Southall … And then it was DDLJ (Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge) that brought everyone back to the cinemas. And I loved that film.
“I thought I would like to make a film like that, but my own version.”
The idea of doing of a Bollywood co-production had been with Chadha for a while. She had been working on a project with Sunny Deol until it fell through largely because Deol wanted “a pure Bollywood (film), with lots of fight scenes.” The Bride and Prejudice concept came to Chadha while washing dishes one day. Chadha thought she would approach Bollywood from a completely opposite angle.
“And I thought what’s the exact opposite of Bollywood,” she says. “It was English literature, classic English literature. From more than 300 years ago. So I thought let me take (Austen), which is so beloved to the English as their classical cultural form, and combine it with something that people will think, ‘Oh my God. That’s never gonna work.’ Sort of like integration.”
By including an American angle, casting Darcy as a snotty American hotel tycoon, there’s even a political slant to the movie, says Chadha.
“It questions the attitude of the United States, the role it’s taken as the premier nation of the world,” she says. “It’s questioning America’s role.”
There will be no more Bollywood for Chadha. Her next directorial venture – an $80 million I Dream of Jeannie prequel for Sony Pictures, starring Kate Hudson – will have no Bollywood songs, dances or music. So, this is your chance to watch Bollywood à la Chadha.
“I think after watching bad pirated copies, everyone really wants to watch the movie in theatres,” Chadha laughs. “They say, haan bada maza aaya (yes, it was fun). But we couldn’t see it properly. So let’s go to the theatres.”
