What a Girl Wants 2003

What a Girl Wants is a 2003 USA from remake of a film and play scripted by William Douglas Home and called the reluctant debutante. The features a young woman brought up by her mother who fantasies about her father with whom she associated when in North Africa and Europe.  Her mother has become a wedding singer and she works as a waitress envying the brides given away by their fathers and with whom they have the second dance.

 

The father is played by Colin Firth as Lord Dashwood who is abandoning his title in order to enter the House of Commons with a view to becoming the party leader and future Prime Minister.  He is being pushed into this course by Jonathan Pryce, an influential political fixer and whose daughter he has become engaged.

 

His natural daughter goes off to Europe and London to meet her father where Pryce attempts to sideline the girl but Firth takes to her and arranges for her to have a coming out season bringing her into contact with royalty and also a young well connected singer. The girl wrestles between the new status and life and her feelings for the young man deciding in the end to return to America. Rather than settled for his life, after meeting the girl’s mother who arrives for the coming out ball he goes to the USA, abandoning his engagement and political career, especially after it emerges that Pryce had originally persuaded the girl’s mother to return to the USA and not marry Firth.   Firth also bring with him the young man and the dream of the girl to have her father give her away at the wedding and have the first dance is fulfilled.  Everyone sigh with happiness.