1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 43
Mira Nair (director), Monsoon Wedding
Beautiful, fresh-faced Aditi Verma returns to her family’s lush New Delhi manor, to participate in an arranged marriage. The Verma family, wealthy and urbane, see this wedding as an opportunity to display their affluence to the extended family, returning home from living scattered in several nations. Only the family patriarch, Lalit Verma, knows he’s actually broke, financing everything on credit. Aditi, meanwhile, hasn’t broken up with her previous boyfriend yet.
According to reputation, screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan wrote this movie hastily, to have something she could workshop for her MFA program. One of her professors, expatriate Indian director Mira Nair, saw something promising in it. Nair set out to realize Dhawan’s story as a combination of an American low-budget indie film, and a Bollywood spectacular. The result straddles two worlds efficiently, capturing the hybrid world of India’s moneyed gentry.
Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah, Gandhi) is a control freak, desperate for a traditional Punjabi wedding. What he really wants, though, is a sleek tourist destination. After all, his family only gets together about once every ten years, and the groom’s family is rich, with connections to American money. Only when Lalit’s credit starts bouncing does he realize he’s tied his personal money into his business, which is critically overextended.
The wedding planner, Dubey, catches the bulk of Lalit’s copious wrath. To his credit, Dubey, a happy-go-lucky kid with seemingly boundless energy and elbows like hatchets, remains unfazed. Until, that is, he glimpses Alice, the Vermas’ patient, doe-eyed housemaid. Alice’s hard work and infinite grace keep the Verma household together, and Dubey realizes he’s become dependent on her to organize this wedding. Maybe he’s starting to feel something more, too.
Aditi, in her middle twenties, agrees to a traditional arranged marriage, to a man she’s only known a few weeks, largely because she realizes it’s advantageous. Her boyfriend, after all, is married. But she has aspirations of being a modern, Westernized woman, like the glamorous Indians living abroad she sees on television. How can she explain to her fiance that she isn’t going to be a traditional Punjabi wife?
Meanwhile Ria, Aditi’s cousin, has thrown herself whole-heartedly into helping Aditi’s wedding preparations. She seems excited for everything happening, until Lalit’s brother-in-law, Tej, arrives from America. Everyone thinks Tej is perfectly avuncular and welcomes him, especially when he offers to cover Ria’s university tuition in America. So why has Ria become suddenly sullen and withdrawn, lashing out at family members with little provocation?
If this seems like a remarkable number of plot threads, I won’t disagree. Like many American indie filmmakers, Dhawan and Nair create an ensemble whose various individual needs are often in conflict; we know somebody is bound for disappointment. The characters achieve their needs only by wheedling and compromising. We wait with anticipation to see how the movie will land all these divergent threads with satisfaction.
Alongside the ordinary, human conflicts, the movie also includes India’s stark economic contrasts. Most of the movie happens on the Verma family’s large gated compound, a spectacle of post-colonial opulence. But to accomplish anything, the characters must venture into streets crowded with cars and beggars. Alice, the maid, lives in a polite but easily ignored cottage on the periphery. Dubey, the wedding planner, lives in a loud, cruddy walk-up flat.
Culture clash dominates. Aditi has lived in New Delhi all her life, but everyone expects she’ll move to Texas with her new husband, which she anticipates with dread. Dubey, clearly Hindu and proud, falls in love with Alice, who sleeps with a crucifix above her bed. Most of the movie’s dialog is in colonial English, and Lalit Verma desperately tries to appear British, but bursts of Hindi appear so often, the movie requires subtitles.
Overall, the movie follows a standard Bollywood beat sheet. It translates these beats, however, for audiences more accustomed to Western cinematic traditions. The song-and-dance breaks for which Bollywood is famous, are replaced by introspective long shots where the sounds of New Delhi come together in almost operatic unity. The love stories resolve themselves concisely, without ever showing anything the state censorship board would consider naughty.
Personally, I was recommended this movie by a clerk at an Indian grocery store. Fascinated by his store’s rack of Bollywood DVDs, I asked for suggestions to get started. He recommended this movie as a good introduction for audiences raised on Western cinema. Because it has its feet firmly planted in two worlds, and explains itself clearly, it proved a perfect introduction for one inquisitive Westerner.
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