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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
This eye-popping Indian wedding comedy is a guaranteed art-house hit. Too bad it misses all the good jokes.
Feb 22, 2002 | "Monsoon Wedding" opens with a blast of music that sounds like what might happen if a marching band tackled Indian Top 40. The credits appear behind shifting blocks of pop-your-eyes-out color so bright it almost hurts to look at the screen. It's somewhere between a psychedelic experience and the credit sequences of those mid-'60s studio movies so desperate to prove themselves "with it."
And the color continues in the movie itself: Declan Quinn's photography shows us lawns carpeted with a bed of fallen marigolds, intricate formal saris, a bejeweled bride done up like a storybook illustration. The director, Mira Nair, calls it "a Bollywood movie, made on my own terms." And while the characters sing and dance from time to time, it's always in a naturalistic setting, and they do it without resorting to four or five costume changes in the course of one number.
"Monsoon Wedding" is an ensemble family comedy about the not-entirely-happy chaos in the days leading up to the wedding of the only daughter of an upper-middle-class Delhi family. Anybody who's ever been involved in a wedding can spot all the potential disasters: a house jammed full of visiting relatives, decorators who are lagging behind schedule, cold feet on the part of at least one member of the happy couple, a general air of combined excitement and irritation and the conviction that nothing will be ready on time. It all comes out all right in the end, of course, just as it did in "Father of the Bride."
What is new in "Monsoon Wedding" is the element of culture clash. Nair, working from a script by Sabrina Dhawan, is trying to achieve something like what Hanif Kureishi did in his novel "The Buddha of Suburbia" and what Zadie Smith did in her "White Teeth," to see the comedy rather than the tragedy of clashing cultures. But both those books were set in England, and their conflict -- the comedy of two different cultures that find themselves in close proximity to each other -- was perhaps more concrete. "Monsoon Wedding," on the other hand, is about the conflict that exists in one culture when modernity rudely bumps up against tradition.
"Monsoon Wedding"
Directed by Mira Nair
Starring Naseeruddin Shah, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Tilotama Shome
Aditi (Vasundhara Das), the young bride-to-be, has agreed to an arranged marriage with Hemant (Parvin Dabas) because the TV host she's been having an affair with shows no signs of leaving his wife. Meanwhile, her father (Naseeruddin Shah) is trying to keep the wedding from emptying the family coffers, and sparring with P.K. (Vijay Raaz), the contractor he's hired to coordinate the ceremony. P.K., a schnook who thinks of himself as a big-time operator, becomes smitten with Alice (Tilotama Shome), the family's maid.
The battle between traditional ideas and modern ones can be a fruitful source of comedy. And I imagine that for Indian audiences, used to lavish Bollywood productions, "Monsoon Wedding" might seem like a revelation: a so-called art movie with enough familiar conventions to lure them in and still show them something like recognizable life on-screen.
The trouble is that "Monsoon Wedding" is about as broad and conventional as a movie can be. It's a crowd-pleaser in the most familiar sense. I wasn't kidding with the comparison to "Father of the Bride." (I'm talking about the 1950 Vincente Minnelli version with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor, not the Disney remake with Steve Martin.) There's something in "Monsoon Wedding" of the forced, cheery conventionality of MGM in the '50s, the idea that the deepest contentment can be found in the blandest of suburbia, and its optimism rings false for many of the same reasons.
It's not wrong or inherently conventional for a movie to celebrate family life and to show us how that life manages to go right despite all the everyday dramas families contend with. (That's the pleasure of Roddy Doyle's "Barrytown Trilogy" of novels, for instance.) "Monsoon Wedding," though, despite a few sops to "relevance," steadfastly remains at a remove from the muck and mess and harmonious discord of families.
