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 What a wonderful, surprising movie. You will be transported, via the rich color, music and most of all characters of this bright, funny and poignant ensemble comedy. As much as you feel as if you have an insider's intimate look at one upper-class Indian family's emotional rollercoaster ride in their preparation for one daughter's wedding, you also recognize the core truths of people everywhere. This is one of the best films I've seen in years. The movie casts a magic spell, and opens doors you will want to go through.
The script of 'Wedding' is basically a Hollywood-style TV melodrama about a family with demons, tensions and financial worries; its mechanical development and laborious ironies clashing with the brimming energy of Nair's film-making (which sometimes descends into pastiche-Fellini, but mostly focuses on vivid, expository scenes, exploring the relationship between character, community and environment - the use of framing to comment on the action recalls another school of melodrama, that of Sirk et al) and the brilliantly natural acting of the hyper-gorgeous cast. Every character, no matter how minor, is memorably, roundly human, with the exception of the paedophile: this refusal to confront his humanity seems like a cheap Hollywood shortcut, a timid evasion of truly unsettling themes (like those of yet another recent family saga, Solondz's 'Happiness'). But, I suppose, that would have spoiled the party. |
It's fun but Mira Nair hasn't been able to find her step since the phenomenal success of "Salaam Bombay." The acting is very natural, the cinematography is gorgeous, and you get a modern portrait of India, rather than some bloated view of its colonial past. There are lots of witty lines and it is a good story that pulls you along, but somehow it doesn't quite come together in the way I had hoped. Mira rather deftly handles the "family secret." But, she floods the screen with incidental characters, rather than reveal the deeper layers of her main characters. Fortunately, the actors convey a lot with their gestures.
As the title suggests, 'Monsoon Wedding' contrasts social occasions, and the social units they embody, such as the family, arranged marriages, traditional rituals and the caste system; with those natural forces impervious to boundaries and rules, such as human desire or nature itself. Centring on an elaborate Indian wedding celebrations, with all its rites and family reunioons, the film throws a number of themes into conflict - tradition and modernity; parents and children; community and individual; natives and emigres; arranged marriage and sexual freedom etc. These tensions create, on the surface, an atmosphere of great exuberance and colour, of laughter and friction; but, as in that other explosive family get-together, Thomas Vinterburg's 'The Celebration' (Festen), dark currents eddy beneath, not just 'acceptable' transgressions such as adultery, but child abuse and homophobia. Unlike 'Celebration', however, these traumas and their exorcism are kept firmly in the private family sphere, away from the public celebrations, which paper over the cracks with ritual, marigolds, music and dance - these reconciliations are about as authentic as the mimed singing (although the most memorable moments in the film are the Bollywood-inspired musical sequences, there is an implicit condescension to these movies' artifice in the context of the film's expose-style 'realism').
