Arranging Love and Marriage

Monsoon Wedding isn’t a subtle film. It is, instead, melodrama at its glorious and exuberant best: When the screen isn’t drenched with the torrential rain of monsoon season, it is saturated in a kaleidoscopic array of color. Characters are often familiar stock players of the wedding film genre and the film’s frenetic energy levels are maintained by a joyfully upbeat score that intrudes upon even the most intimate and contemplative of scenes.

It is clear, in other words, that subtlety isn’t the point. Instead, as the preparations for an arranged marriage between two wealthy New Delhi families unfold, we engage in the heady rush towards the cosmopolitanism which India’s burgeoning middle classes have so eagerly embraced. Mira Nair ’79 of Salaam Bombay and Mississipi Masala fame has often been criticized for selling Indian poverty in documentary form to the West. Monsoon Wedding represents a stark departure from these previous features. Making little or no attempt to represent income disparities, it instead celebrates the joys of excess and consumption, perfectly illustrated through the analogy of a wedding.

The film explores five intertwining family relationships which are all bought to a climatic point of self-awareness by the impending nuptials. The plot threatens to descend into a soap opera from the very beginning. Struggling to end a torrid affair with her former boss, the young professional Aditi (radiantly performed by Vasundhara Das) has just days to reconsile with her arranged marriage to Hemant (Parvin Dabas), a handsome if slightly dull engineer who remains clueless to Aditi’s extramarital shenanigans.

But it is not just the plot that has been constructed to demonstrate a clash between Easteran and Western cultural values. The relationships seem to have been constructed to demonstrate the ravages of globalization: Hemant, for example, has flown in from Houston and is clumsily out of touch with traditional Indian customs; Aditi’s cousin begins an affair with a distant Australian relative whose western norms of sexual permissiveness complicate the coupling; and the wedding planner, Mr. Dubey (Vijay Razz) threatens to become a mocking caricature of the upwardly mobile Indian, with his prized collection of digital gadgetry, dedication to “foreign fashion” and insistence on the pompous title of “events manager.”

The action is at its most convincing when it appears to be unfolding before our eyes, an effect no doubt helped by Nair’s decision to film almost entirely on Super 16mm—blown up to 35mm—retaining the mesmerizing freneticism of the hand held camera. Just when the sprawling rhythms of the film seem to settle into a rhythm, however, a melodramatic twist is introduced at the heart of the plot. The twist is at best, unnessecary, but at worst, jarring—a clunky piece of engineering that suddenly makes it unclear whether we are watching a light hearted romantic comedy or a deeper sociological commentary.

Ultimately the plot is far less important than the sheer visual spectacle. Small vignettes are linked with anecdotal ease by the music, which forms an integral part of the action and sometimes threatens to become the film’s greatest star. The film is the way it appears to spiral seemingly out of control in a plethora of directions, perhaps stemming from the fact that much of the movie was improvised.

To describe Monsoon Wedding as a film about culture clash and the effects of westernization on traditional Indian culture would be selling it short. Certainly, there are elements of cultural tension: Even as the family prepares to celebrate an arranged marriage, they speak in a jumble of Hindi and English (the young men tell everyone to “chill” in English, while grandmothers speak only Hindi) and the girls read Cosmopolitan, while the boys watch MTV. In any case, Nair’s message on globalization is unclear, for while she evidently reveres traditional culture through her attention to details during the wedding preparations, she highlights the liberating effects of western culture on the more suffocating elements of daily Indian life.

The most joyful moments come not from pithy political insights, but rather from the unexpected bonds which emerge between family members. In one particularly well-realized scene, Varun, the sybaritic and spoilt 11-year-old son, teaches his nervous and rheumatic father to dance in preparation for the wedding celebrations. He is at first reluctant to learn the requisite moves, but in the film’s final scene, the father is glimpsed amongst the crowd dancing with considerable aplomb. Monsoon Wedding is full of such scenes and is a true crowd pleaser. For all its larger-than-life excesses, it balances humor and humanity with a deft touch; it is outlandishly irresistible.

film

Monsoon Wedding

Directed by Mira Nair

Starring Vasimdhara Das, Parvin Dabas

USA Films