6 Reworkings Of Pride And Prejudice (That Are Better Than Pride And Prejudice And Zombies)

4. Bride And Prejudice

Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha's follow-up movie was another clash of an English cultural icon and a traditional Indian family, as Austen's Hertfordshire-set Regency romance was transplanted to twenty-first century Punjab. It's a perfect setting for a fresh take on the traditional narrative of a family in which the mother perceives her daughters' only worth is in marrying them off. Beauty queen and Bollywood icon Aishwarya Rai's Lalita Bakshi is a likeable, if a little too perfect, Lizzie Bennet, wooed by Martin Henderson's slightly bland Will Darcy (here an American hotel owner) and the more entertaining Mr Kholi (Eastenders star Nitin Ganatra's take on the insufferable Mr Collins reimagined as a crass, showy Americanised Indian). This British-American-Indian co-production's real strength, though, is in bringing together the respective film styles of the two cultures. Neither really a Hollywood film, nor a Bollywood one, this is however Austen with an injection of vibrant colours and lavishly impressive song and dance numbers.