Bollywood style, Dogma budget
Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding merges disparate styles for a new look at New Delhi
PREVIEW
MONSOON WEDDING
Starring Vasundhara Das and Naseeruddin Shah. Directed by Mira Nair
Opens Friday, March 22
Plaza Theatre
Joyful and chaotic, Monsoon Wedding is itself the marriage of two unlikely partners. The new movie by Mira Nair (director of Salaam Bombay! and Kama Sutra) matches the immediacy of a Dogma film with the excess of a Bollywood musical romance. The constant outbreaks of singing and dancing add exuberance to a multi-layered domestic drama.
What’s more, Nair provides a look at New Delhi as the city westernizes into a circus of cellphones, saris, golf foursomes, hennaed hands and shiny BMWs. As Nair said in an interview at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Monsoon Wedding is thoughtful arthouse fodder that also "gives you everything a Bollywood film gives you – you laugh, you cry, you come dancing down the aisles. What more could you want?"
While a complimentary Indian buffet would be nice, the film offers plenty to savour. It portrays a wealthy Punjabi family, the Vermas, in the days before the wedding of daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das). The bride has consented to an arranged marriage – with Hemant (Parvin Dabas), an engineer who lives in Houston – even though she has yet to entirely break off an affair with her boss. Meanwhile, father Lalit (Naseeruddin Shah) worries that the wedding may cause his financial ruin, and cousin Ria (Shefali Shetty) harbours a secret that could derail the festivities. Elsewhere in the busy household, two romances blossom: University of Sydney student Rahul (Randeep Hooda) ponders a fling with tattooed teenager Ayesha (Neha Dubey), and harried event organizer Dubey (Vijay Raaz) falls for Alice (Tilotama Shome), the Vermas's maid.
The winner of the Golden Lion prize at Venice last year and an audience award winner in Toronto, Monsoon Wedding presents a version of contemporary India that Nair herself was surprised to discover. She developed the film after meeting Sabrina Dhawan, a student in a course that Nair taught at Columbia University in New York. Like Nair, Dhawan is a Punjabi who grew up in New Delhi, but the young screenwriter introduced Nair to a far different city than the one she knew.
"She’s more than 10 years younger than I am, and what was really startling to me about her perception of New Delhi was the whole new amorality to it, the sexuality of that younger lot," says Nair. "I did not know what was going on in the bedrooms, back streets and universities as much as she did. It’s amazing what’s going on and the movie’s totally there."
To Nair, the beauty of India is that it is always changing. "We are always open to so much – first from the British, then the so-called American globalization and cultural imperialism," she says. "If there’s any country that can withstand it, it’s India. For centuries, we’ve assimilated, absorbed, manipulated, twisted, plagiarized and made something from all that that is inimitably Indian – that’s really the fact of it. I believe maybe that’s because the foundation of the older culture is so strong, that all these layers – the tattoos and the Guccis and the amorality – can co-exist. It’s like someone who wears miniskirts in the morning and bejewelled saris at night."
Likewise, Monsoon Wedding absorbs several movie modes to create something uniquely Indian. Nair was excited to try the "lean and mean" approach, making the film with a small, tight-knit crew on a short shooting schedule. Yet the film is more lavish than raw, especially in its most dazzling sequence, when the sexy Ayesha dances and lip-synchs to an Indian pop hit at a pre-wedding party.
"What I wanted was sort of a homemade version of a Bollywood number," says Nair. "That’s what goes on realistically – even our own family weddings have become Bollywoodized. The niece of the house will imitate some movie star’s hit song for the family. This would never happen 10 years ago."
The creation of the scene involved celebrated Bollywood choreographer Farah Khan, who was shocked at the modesty of Nair’s means. "We shot the scene in a friend’s pool, a fantastic mosaic pool that’s better than any Bollywood movie set," says Nair. "But we only had it for one night. I basically asked Farah to choreograph it while we were shooting it. We had one camera and more scenes in that day than you can imagine and only one night.
"Farah seriously asked me, ‘How many days do we have here? Four or seven?’ I told her, ‘Are you mad? We have three hours for this big dance number because after this, I have to do two more dramatic scenes, then the whole family has to dance and the lovers have to kiss and leave.’ She said, ‘You’ve got to be joking.’ I said, ‘No, no, we’ll do it.’ We just flew, take after take. We had to because we were fighting the dawn."
Because Monsoon Wedding is so fleet-footed – helped immensely by the score by Mychael Danna, who incorporates Bollywood love songs and bhangra hits with his own Eastern-tinged orchestrations – it can cover a tremendous amount of emotional, social and stylistic terrain. Indeed, the film negotiates the disparate styles and approaches so successfully that any perceived clash between ancient and modern or East and West swiftly vanishes, even if the picturesque montages of New Delhi street life hint at a darker reality for people who aren’t as wealthy as the Vermas.
As it synthesizes Dogma grit with Bollywood fantasy, Monsoon Wedding presents the best of all possible Indias. |
