Fridae

The husband and wife team behind Bride and Prejudice and Bend it like Beckham may be British Indians making films starring Asians but do not be fooled – first and foremost, they are British filmmakers making very English comedies about marriage, set in very English towns and suburbia.

In their latest outing, Its a Wonderful Afterlife, the filmmakers revisit their favourite Ealing comedy genre. In their effort to keep things fresh and unpredictable, Berges and Chadha throw the deadpan horror comedy and the ghoulish murder mystery them into their big melting pot.

There’s the romantic comedy, which consists of the misadventures of Mrs Sethi, a long-suffering Sikh widow trying to get her Roopi, plus-sized daughter married off to a suitable boy. There’s the madcap send-up of the murder mystery, where an inept police force blunders about trying to solve a series of murders, whose victims are all connected to Roopi’s past dates and marriage prospects. And there’s also the deadpan horror comedy where the ghosts of the victims banter with Mrs Sethi, their murderer, and form a comic Greek chorus as she continues her quest to get Roopi married off.

All these disparate threads do come together as a comedy so dry and deadpan, it’s hard not to smile at the proceedings or to even howl in laughter at how blasé characters carry themselves despite all the madcap chaos that is happening. It’s one thing to bring together three separate genres into a film so effortlessly, but what’s so amazing about this film is how Chadha and Berges have succeeded in recreating the feel of various English comedy genres from the 1950s and 60s. Now, you can’t really say they don’t make films like that these days.