10/9/2004 » Film, TV

Director Gurinder Chadha’s next film will be a $90M prequel to the TV series I Dream of Jeannie, probably her highest-budget film to date. The series ran from 1965-’70 as a clone of Bewitched that made Barbara Eden’s career and made Larry Hagman a household name before Dallas.

Chadha’s middlebrow style is well-suited to this kitschy theme, but I wonder how her feminist sensibilities will play. This is, after all, the series that made the line ‘Yes, master?’ famous and kept the busty, blond Stepford djinn in a bottle at home. I suppose her omnipotence makes up for it, but Jeannie’s long since been overtaken by the winky, S&M version of magical subservience. Can you still parody a parody?

“It’s all about a girl who wants to be a soldier in the king’s army. She’s very good at sword fighting. But her mother says no... there comes a time when she has to put her sword down and be serious, get married, be in a harem. And in my films girls never end up doing that... The king then casts a spell on her and says, ‘From this day you will have to say ‘Yes, master’ to every man you see.’ My film is about how she tries to break that spell.”

Jeannie’s mother holding her back from physical pursuits sounds familiar. Hey, it’s Slash It Like Sikander. And breaking an obedience spell? Shades of Ella Enchanted. Ah well, Jeannie was derivative, but we were all bewitched anyway.

Jeannie’s period look, her beehive ’do and the upturned mascara at the corner of her eye, was widely imitated in Bollywood. Her bustier top and genie pants were a bad rehash of harem girl stereotypes, so this film gives the British director a chance to reshape a piece of Americana:

[T]he script Chadha is filming... starts in Arabia in 200 BC. "She''''''''s a Muslim girl, and the story is about Muslims," she says. "The notion of women in burkas on a big Hollywood screen is pretty radical."