Monsoon Wedding Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)April 16th, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
MONSOON WEDDING
Directed by Mira Nair
R, 113 minutes
The harried father of the bride stands beneath a floral bower, fuming as garlands come undone and marigold petals fall like confetti. The movie has just started, the wedding is a few days off, and things are falling apart.
The bride and groom have not yet met. The bride is having an affair with a married talk show host. Her parents are overextended financially. Their pudgy adolescent son likes to dance and watch cooking shows on television. The groom's family, the size of the cast of a Broadway musical, is descending en masse. The rascally wedding planner is a study in insubordination and price-gouging. The wealthy family benefactor comes with a history of in-house pedophilia, with a former and a prospective victim on the scene. And storm clouds are gathering over New Delhi.
Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala) tosses this all at us like a shaman scattering bones, and then leads us through it, gradually revealing patterns and making sense of the confusion. It's a risky gambit. There are times when the entropy seems irreversible; the welter of indistinguishable characters and intermingled plotlines and conflicting cultures makes for some heavy weather in the early going. But a little patience with Monsoon Wedding reaps rewards.
Aditi (Vasundhara Das, an Indian pop star) has agreed to a traditional arranged marriage, reasoning that she's not getting any younger waiting for her sleazy lover to make good on promises to divorce his wife. The groom is Hemant (Parvin Dabas), an Indian now practicing computer programming in Houston. The bride's parents (Naseeruddin Shah and Lillette Dubey) are a middle-class couple trying to put on an upper-middle-class wedding, with predictable economic strain. P.K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz), the wedding planner, is scornful of cost-cutting and cynical about romance - until it kicks him in the face in the person of the family servant Alice (the lovely Tilotama Shome). Other relationships spring up, but you won't have time to sort out most of them, with the dark exception of the attraction of the silver-haired older man to a prepubescent girl.
P.K., the wedding planner, saunters through the first half of the movie as a preening, broadly comic figure, often amusing but seldom convincing. But when the shy, appealing Alice catches his heart, he summons another dimension which makes him a little sappier but a lot more interesting. Nair gives us a beautifully off-beat scene in which P.K. goes home to his apartment. As his mother, never seen, nags him about not providing her with grandchildren, he strips down to his underwear and wanders out onto the balcony, brooding about the direction of his life as he watches birds and kites wheeling in the dusky sky above Delhi.
Nair's movie celebrates the kaleidoscopic energy of modern-day India with its melting pot of the traditional and the contemporary. "We have always been seamless in India between tradition and modernity," she explains. "We are used to the most extraordinary things in one moment. To hold a cell phone and sing a traditional bawdy women's folk song is completely normal to me."
But it is in its quieter moments that the film finds the touchstones that bring its characters into focus: a tender, defining moment between Aditi and Hemant, a touching, almost ceremonial gesture of love from P.K. to Alice, and from the father, an act of extraordinary courage by a man with very little of it to draw on.
Nair and screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan, her former teaching assistant at Columbia's graduate film school, have deliberately concocted a movie that is part Hollywood (think Father of the Bride or Altman's A Wedding) and part Bollywood (the nickname of the Indian film industry, centered in Bombay, an exuberant tradition that embraces song, dance, extravagant sentiment, flamboyant artifice, and pure corn.) Their dialogue sometimes wanders into the bathetic: the father, standing over his sleeping children, murmurs "How did they grow up so fast? And how did we get so old?" But it has the saving grace of being the sort of thing people, especially people without a highly developed sense of self-irony, do say. And it helps that the dialogue comes in three languages (English, Hindi, and Punjabi), sometimes within the same sentence.
Declan Quinn's cinematography, much of it hand-held, beautifully captures the tumult and the beauty and the color of a traditional Indian wedding. And the movie makes an intriguing case for arranged marriage, provided the bride and groom both turn out to be sensitive, intelligent, and gorgeous.
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