dir. Chadha
8/28/08
While Bride and Prejudice may be a more Americanized version of Bollywood productions, this movie was my first encounter with any Bollywood at all. One thing that I noticed about the film is the wardrobe of the characters, which fits in with the post-colonialism theme. In class, we discussed the definition to be a "period when a country is developing their own identity after being a colony." The daughters (especially the youngest) definitely dressed very modern in jeans and even rather revealing shirts. However, they also all wore the traditional outfits for all the weddings in the film. The mother was definitely still in traditional outfits every day. The daughters' outfits represent the country's modernization and growing independent identity, while still staying traditional after being a colony.
Another thing I noticed about this film was the musical components. I felt that many of the numbers were kind of thrown into the script because a component to Bollywood films is the song and dance. Some of the songs seemed to come out of no where and were put in simply for the sake of having them. There were also huge gaps in between songs where it was simply dialogue like "normal" movies. This was another indication that the numbers that were in there (mostly the beginning) were just there to fufill the characteristic. Once they were existent, the movie didn't really need anymore to make it complete, so the writers only added a few more.
