by David Chute
Published in FILM COMMENT, January-February, 2002.
Mira Nair's up-front assertion that her Venice prize-winner Monsoon
Wedding, "is a Bollywood movie, made on my own terms," is, at first
glance, somewhat puzzling. Her basic shooting style here could be
described as hand-held realism, an artifact of an aesthetic universe
light years from the glossy three-hour spectacles of the Hindi movie
capitol. Originally envisioned as a DV house party along the lines of
The Celebration, in which a clan assembles to dance and sing their way
through several days of nuptial festivities, the movie ended up in
super-16mm, shot quickly in an actual sprawling middle-class home in
Delhi.
But the color-saturated world the film presents÷in vivid but
slightly grainy images that have a pleasing ćorganicä roughness, like
swatches of hand-dyed fabric÷is one that comes pre-steeped in Bollywood
music and narrative conventions. When Nair depicts her characters
lip-synching to Hindi film tunes, this isnāt a post-modern indulgence. It is a
fact of Punjabi extended-family life, faithfully recorded.
As in many Hindi movies, the plot of Monsoon Wedding hinges upon an
arranged marriage that evolves into a love match÷in this case between
the earnest and lovely first daughter of the prosperous Verma family,
Aditi (pop singer Vasundhara Das), and a handsome young Non-Resident
Indian (NRI), an engineer from Houston (Parvin Dabas), who has flown in
for the occasion and will soon fly away again with his new bride. The
subplot about a pair of hot-blooded teenagers (Neha Dubey and Randeep
Hooda) from far-flung branches of the family, who begin as supporting
characters in the central wedding drama and then become the protagonists
in a love story of their own, echoes Sooraj Barjatyaās 1994 mega-hit Hum Aapke Hain Koun (What Am I to You), a Hindu Family Values musical
that has been described as a "three-hour wedding video."
There are crucial differences, too: The stately homes of the super-rich
in films like Hum Aapke Hain Koun are really castles of fantasy, huge
over-decorated spaces that even in the throes of a wedding party never
feel cramped÷thereās always plenty of room for the chorus line. The
Verma household in Monsoon Wedding is spacious on a more normal scale,
and before long, the guests are literally tripping over each other. In
this enclosed environment the closeness of a Hindu joint family can
begin to take on a stifling hot-house quality, which Nair accentuates
with her crowded staging and eavesdropping camerawork. The one
mold-breaking sub-plot, in which a beloved relative is exposed as a
sexual predator, can be read as an extension of this visual critique of
standard Bollywood accounts of the benefits of family closeness.
Monsoon
Wedding's critique of tradition is not meant to be dismissive or
contemptuous, however, as it often turns out to be in snot-nosed NRI
productions like Hyderabad Blues and American Desi, which have been
described as "adolescent tantrum movies." In fact, Nair turns the
resolution of the pedophile subplot into a reformist affirmation, when
paterfamilias Lalit Verma (beautifully played by the great Bollywood and
art-film actor Naseeruddin Shah) sets aside the unwritten law that
insists that a fa?ade of family unity must be maintained at any cost,
and turns the offender out his house: Nairās updated version of Hindu
Family Values is expansive and flexible enough to accommodate some
politically correct revisionism.
The filmās most overt visual references to old Hindi movies crop up in
the parallel romantic drama that develops "downstairs" between an
initially clownish wedding planner, P.K. Dube (Vijay Raaz), and the
Verma family servant, Alice (Tilotama Shome), whose grave, watchful,
presence temporarily stuns the loquacious hustler into slack-jawed
silence. It makes perfect sense that the touchstone films that make
their bone-deep cultural influence visible in the behavior of the servants are
older classics like Raj Kapoor's Shri 420 (54) and Guru Dutt's Pyaasa
(57), rather than the bouncier modern Bollywood hits the cosmopolitan
Vermas embrace, albeit with a glint of irony. But not even these
daringly drawn-out iconic tableaux violate the filmās essential realism:
When the servant-lovers instinctively assume the expressive postures
that the occasion seems to call for, their natural models are the dream-spinners
of Bollywood.
If youāre one of those sour persimmons who insists that Indian popular
cinema is simply too kitschy, or too boisterously affirmative, to breach
the defenses of jaded Westerners, you may find the infectious charm of
Monsoon Wedding hard to explain. The most youāll be able to manage,
probably, is explaining it away with some misplaced Robert Altman
references. Whether they knew it or not, the Venice jury was swayed by a
force far greater than a single movie. Mira Nair has tapped into one of
the planetās last great sources of renewable human energy.
Return to Hungry Ghost Home Page