Losing the plot out East

At the dodgier end of the used-car trade, there's a phenomenon known as "cut-andshut". This is when you take a motor that has been in a front-end collision and one of the same model that has been rammed up the back, cut both the wrecks in half and weld together the viable portions.

Needless to say, such vehicles are notoriously unreliable. Despite some nice touches and a certain fizz, Gurinder Chadha's Bride & Prejudice is a cut-and-shut of a film.

Chadha, best known for her two other cross-cultural outings, Bhaji on the Beach and Bend It Like Beckham, subscribes to the widely held view that the "universality" of Jane Austen's novels means that it's entirely legitimate to cut the plot out of them, while discarding more or less everything else: characters, settings, descriptions, moral overview...

She has then welded on to this Austenian bonnet a Bollywood back end consisting of lavish song-anddance numbers (including the obligatory erotic novelty act and comic turn), travelogue settings, and true lovers eventually uniting despite a welter of obstructions.

To be fair, this last characteristic of Bollywood musicals is shared by any number of narrative forms, including Jane Austen's novels, but the problem with Bride & Prejudice is not that there is no conceivable Indian adaptation of this text, it's that this particular one is straitjacketed, rather than liberated, by its original.

In part, this is because Chadha is involved in a cut-and-shut exercise to begin with, by joining together English, American and Indian actors (and settings) in a distinctively Indian genre movie. The bolting on of a 200-year-old plot line is entirely surplus to requirements.

Of course, I don't suppose the overlap between people who have read Pride and Prejudice and people who enjoy mutant Bollywood musicals is really that great, so it may well be that the audience for this film will simply sit back and enjoy the ride, oblivious of the fact that the vehicle that they're riding in may come apart at the seams. But I doubt it.

The great strength of Chadha's Bend It Like Beckham was that it incorporated a feel-good attitude to racial and cultural distinctions into a believable contemporary British setting. It showed a British audience what, one hopes, they would like to feel about themselves: football mad, yes, but also tolerant, inclusive, non-misogynistic and anti-racist. From the British Asian perspective, Bend It was a paean to gentle and painless assimilation.

But Bride & Prejudice isn't set in Hounslow - rather Amritsar, the very conservative heart of the very conservative Punjab. Here we find the Bakshi (aka Bennet) family, shabby-genteel and with four marriageable daughters, Jaya, Lalita, Lakhi and Maya.

Mrs Bakshi (Nadira Babbar) is obsessed with grabbing rich husbands for her girls, so when Balraj (Naveen Andrews in the Charles Bingley role), an Oxford-educated Indian expatriate, comes to town with his friend William Darcy ( Martin Henderson), a super-rich American hotelier, she springs into action.