A Jane Austen-pattern fairy tale cut out of the gaudy fabric of a Bollywood musical. After pointlessly altering the first word of the familiar title, filmmaker Gurinder Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach, Bend It Like Beckham) aggressively pushes the third word into the realm of race relations, as an Ugly American hotel king, retaining the family name of Darcy, and idly looking to acquire a property in what he views as "Hicksville, India," butts heads with a marriageable but modern-minded native ("I thought we got rid of imperialists like you"), quite impervious to the advice of her conventional mother: "Don't say anything too intelligent." (It is still a fairy tale, for all that, a long way shy of a Kipling-pattern miscegenation tale along the lines of Without Benefit of Clergy or Beyond the Pale.) The American, played or merely represented by the callow, wooden, male-modelly Martin Henderson, is so unappealing that the viewer is apt to root against détente, and is apt to think less of the immensely appealing Aishwarya Rai when she inevitably relents. The song-and-dance number of the four unmarried sisters in their pj's, "No Life without Wife," is the tipsy highpoint, though there are long dry spells during which you can almost forget that the movie is a musical. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.