It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a film as much fun as Gurinder Chadha’s clever Bride and Prejudice, where Bollywood meets Jane Austen in a fusion of luscious colors and costumes, beautiful women, catchy tunes and clever update of Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice. This Bride is fast and funny entertainment spiked with terrific music and high comedy.

The plot will be familiar to anyone who’s read the novel or seen the numerous other screen adaptations. Updated to present day bustling India, Lalita (Aishwarya Rai, as Austen heroine Elizabeth) and her three lovely sisters are destined to be old maids or victims of arranged marriages at the hand of their harried mother (Nadira Babbar).

Romantic complications ensue with the arrival of four very different suitors: Darcy (Martin Henderson), a wealthy American hotel magnate; Bingley (Naveen Andrews), Darcy’s Indian best friend, smitten with Lalita’s sister; charismatic Brit Wickham (Daniel Gillies), who may be too good to be true; and Americanized Indian fop Kholi (Nitin Ganatra), a comic foil who represents a nightmare Indian sell-out, whose over-embrace of Americana is used to considerable comic effect. Mixed throughout these encounters are some sweet songs and resonant discussions of culture, tradition and family.

Director Chadha (Bhaji on the Beach), the Indian filmmaker raised in a West London Sikh Punjabi family and creator of 2003’s surprise hit Bend it Like Beckham (the winning tale of a London Punjabi girl who breaks from family tradition to pursue a passion for soccer), has little in common with India’s jewel Mira Nair. She pointedly addresses—with eloquent and sharp precision—the shrinking cultural divide between East and West under the pressures of Western globalization and its steamrolling consequences on industry as well as heritage and family tradition in modern-day India. It’s a tall order for a light comedy, but somehow it all comes together on the wings of a young Indian actress of uncommon beauty, talent and directness.

Her name is Aishwarya Rai, a big star in India and acting and singing here for the very first time completely in English. It’s doubtful Austen herself could have imagined a more intelligent and beautiful heroine. As embodied by Rai, Lalita has super-smart determination, killer looks and fiery independence. She’s proud of her country and culture, and unafraid to defend that love against Darcy—whom she sees less as a romantic threat and more a symbol of imperialism that once reigned in India—a modern day capitalist pig from the West preoccupied with big business, in this case the acquisition of a lavish hotel.

The cast is uniformly fine with the exception of blue-eyed Henderson (The Ring), who plays the American snob a bit stiff to my taste. The standouts here are Rai and the wondrously funny Nadira Babbar, desperately trying to marry her "spinsters" to just about any Indian man who’ll have them, performing with equal measures beleaguered sarcasm and manipulation, inducing hearty laughs.

Chadha pulls no punches in her indictment of shallow American greed and consumerism as it relates to Darcy and his equally vapid mother (Marsha Mason), but also to suitor Kholi, the exaggerated Indian expatriate who’s fled to Hollywood and returns looking for a subservient Indian wife. There’s much fun to be had here with Ganatra’s ripe performance and checklist of American "corruptions," from obsessive power walking to hip-hop music to numerous vainglorious bragging sessions about the size of his…um…house.

Bride and Prejudice, in its own perfectly entertaining way, is a cultural comedy that tries to have it both ways—social comedy and broad farce, romantic drama and colorful musical, Eastern tradition that ultimately embraces the West. I smiled from its first extravagant Bollywood production number to its romantically absurd American pop music video montage. It’s a fizzy, enjoyable movie, an occasionally thoughtful cultural essay, a star-crossed romance and a first class pageant. Chadha, like her overstuffed film, has it both ways—she’s the director as social observer, all right, but as the climaxes of both Bend it Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice unspool, she’s proves a populist at heart. Lucky for us.