The music (which includes a performance by that great Indian pop star Ashanti -- seen to much better effect in "Coach Carter") is a mishmash of imitation-Bollywood pop and numbers with the pumped-up saccharine feel of bad '80s pop. Chadha precedes the first dance number with a character making a disparaging remark about Andrews' attempts to be "the Indian MC Hammer" and it's as if she were apologizing in advance for the stylized convention of characters bursting into song and dance. She then goes on to sabotage the number by cutting against the rhythm of the dancers, or cutting away from them entirely.

The movie does wind up showing some welcome generosity to one character (Nitin Ganatra), who is at first purely an object of fun. There's an unexpectedly mature scene where a friend of Rai's defends the compromise she made in selecting her husband and makes it sound like a reasonable choice. And I liked Rai's answer to Henderson's disparaging remarks about arranged marriage: She tells him she and her friends see the custom as an international dating service.

Chadha seems to think that she's bringing substance to froth by making arranged marriage (or, in this case, interracial marriage) a topic of discussion. But as the Indian film critic Anupama Chopra points out in her monograph on the Indian film "Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge," the lovers who must fight against the convention of arranged marriage (or class or race) to be together is a staple of Bollywood movies. Chopra is reminding us that one of the functions of melodrama is to produce dramatic tension via a plot that challenges the status quo. (Which may be why women's concerns were so often addressed in the "weepers," movies and novels aimed at a female audience.) And in the context of traditional entertainment, those challenges often reverberate more than they do in work done outside the mainstream.

Luckily, we don't have to settle for "Bride & Prejudice." Even if you don't live in a city where Indian movies are shown, many of Aishwarya Rai's movies are available on DVD. (I've found DVDdhamaka.com fast, reliable, and reasonably priced.) Even better, one of those movies is a Jane Austen adaptation.

Rajiv Menon's 2000 "I Have Found It" ("Kandukondain, Kandukondain") is a delightful modern-day version of "Sense and Sensibility" whose simultaneous freedom and fidelity to Austen puts the illustrated-classic slavishness of Ang Lee's version to shame. (Important: Look for the just-released Kino Video DVD of this film. The previous DVD version had subtitles that whizzed by, a problem that, after the first few minutes, the Kino version corrects.) Menon handles the melodrama of the disinherited woman and her three unmarried daughters with precisely the right touch. It's never so heavy that he makes you fear for the women. Menon brings the same light touch to the making-of-a-movie subplot, with the oldest daughter (Tabu) falling in love with an aspiring film director. These scenes are never knowingly po-mo, even as Menon achieves a pleasing irony in the young director caught up in just the sort of romantic complications he'll likely wind up making movies about. The tone of "I Have Found It" is less broad, less forced than many Bollywood films. The way in which Manon pairs off the characters romantically is so gracefully achieved it's as if they were ice skaters gliding together.

The pleasure of watching Rai here is seeing the collisions on the way to her happily ever after. It's a pity someone wasn't around to show Rai's entrance here to Gurinder Chadha: a close-up of her face as she emerges from beneath the water in a swimming pool. The role (the Marianne character of Austen's novel, here called Meena) is well-suited to Rai the dreamy and dreaming romantic heroine, and Rai the nonwilting violet who instinctively throws down challenges to the men interested in her. Luckily, Rai has limited romantic interaction with the actor Abbas, as the financial wunderkind who falls for her (he's a dull, doughy presence), and some lovely moments with Mammootty as the wounded ex-army captain she slowly realizes is the man for her. Meena and the captain have the kind of companionable combustibility that tells you they're made for each other, and Rai and Mammootty (warm and affecting as a man regaining the dignity he has thrown away) play their scenes together beautifully.

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