Monsoon Wedding was my first Hindi movie. By the time I heard about it, it had already come and gone from American theatres. It played mostly in major cities in artsy theatres and was advertised in newspapers, not the usual mainstream theatres with promo trailers on TV. So I had to wait for the release of the DVD, which was October 2002. I watched it for the first time seconds after it arrived in my mailbox, and four more times after that. (Let’s count Monica’s viewings: 1. alone; 2. with husband; 3. with visiting NRI mother; 4. alone, listening to “the director’s commentary”; 5. with eight of my best all-American, know-nothing-about-Indian-culture-but-very-open-to-learning girlfriends, ages 31-46.)
In case I haven’t adequately indicated where I’m headed with this review: I love, Love, LOVE Monsoon Wedding. Everyone I know who has seen this movie loves it. Two-thumbs up. Five stars. Sign me up for the Mira Nair Fan Club!
How Did I Hear About Monsoon Wedding?
It was the release/reviews of the Hollywood movie My Big, Fat Greek Wedding that brought Monsoon Wedding to my attention. I kept reading that MBFGW (which my friends and I loved) was nothing compared to MW, and I thought, “What the heck? An Indian movie with rave reviews in America, and I’ve never heard of it?!” I phoned my father, who lives half a continent away, and asked, “Do you know anything about a movie called Monsoon Wedding?” Dad: “Oh, yes! It was great! Actually, it was your [college-aged] sister who told me about it and told me to go see it. She’s more in touch with her Indian heritage [than you are], you know.” Yes, I know. She is also 12 years younger, lives in the Washington, DC area (a metropolitan, cosmopolitan, internationally cognizant area), and has had the benefit of growing up with FAR more Indian-American families around her, compared to when I was growing up, and we barely had any. (Both of us were raised in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, but I went away for college and have not lived there since.)
Why Monsoon Wedding Rocks
I cannot possibly enumerate all the reasons I love this movie, but let me take a crack at the biggies. First and foremost, Monsoon Wedding provides a glimpse of contemporary upper-middle-class Indian culture (not villages, not poverty) and shows universal bonds that link us all together as one race--the human race. It is very easy to see differences among people--especially if they look, talk, eat, dress, worship, etc. differently. But despite the most blatant differences, there is almost always commonality, if only you look beneath the surface. And that is what this movie so beautifully shows. For example, when I watched with my friends, they all exclaimed in a happy sort of “delighted surprise” that they saw our camaraderie/kinship reflected in the scene where the young women are giggling and tease the bride that she has “breasts like baby mangoes.” My friends said, “They’re just like us!” Ah, yes, the universal, timeless sisterhood of girls giggling over boys. May it live on and unite women everywhere. :)
From a storytelling-craft perspective, Mira Nair masterfully interwove various threads around the central spine of the story, a contemporary arranged marriage. These mini-stories dovetail with amazing grace/resonance: 1) bride’s affair with married man; 2) father/mother-of-the-bride; 3) pedophile uncle; 4) “Idiot” Aussie cousin’s romance; 5) Wedding planner/house maid romance; 6) bride’s little brother.
The acting is fantastic. The music is wonderful. I loved the dancing and the whole idea of masti (new word for me), a zest for life. It did suck not to have English subtitles for the soundtrack and not understand any of the lyrics, but hey, the beat’s great, and it all sounds good, whatever they’re singing. :)
The social issues made me think and still linger in my mind as I turn them over and over. The issue of adultery made for deep discussion amongst my friends, and as with so much in life, I find the more I know on any subject, the more I realize I don’t know. The older I get, the fewer absolutes, the more (infinite) shades of gray I see.
From the Outside Looking In
About that mixture of English/Hindi/Punjabi… When you aren’t used to Indian accents, especially when speaking in rapid-fire-English, you need subtitles, even for the English. :) In viewing #5, I discovered a subtitle option on the DVD that provided something akin to “closed captions” for all dialogue. To my surprise, I discovered there were many lines (in English!) I’d completely missed in the previous four viewings! :)
Buzz that I kept hearing/reading, but not understanding (I am just now starting to get it, but I still have a long way to go): ''Monsoon Wedding is very 'real.' It’s not a Bollywood flick. It’s low-budget, not splashy like Bollywood. It’s a typical Punjabi, Delhi upper-middle-class family/wedding.'' These things meant nothing to me. I don’t know enough on these subjects to differentiate real from not real, and I’d never seen a Bollywood film. (I have now seen 10! I’m good and hooked! But it was Monsoon Wedding that opened the door.)
It was in watching Mira Nair’s commentary (for anyone who doesn’t know what this is, on DVD, there is often a special bonus option you can select to watch the movie with the director’s narrative providing the inside story behind the story), that I gained insights into what I was seeing. I also learned from my NRI mother. I was delighted to be able to pass my key learnings on to my friends and actually be able to answer some of their questions!
Behind The Scenes – From Mira Nair’s Commentary
Here are some things I gleaned from the director’s commentary, in case anyone doesn’t know this stuff... I’m passing along the inside scoop...
The saris that the bride’s mother says she has been collecting for her daughter “since the day she was born” (my friends and I loved this scene, again universal chords!), in fact, belong to the director’s mother. The director’s mother is shown dancing in one of the wedding crowd dance scenes. The bride’s mother and the cousin who performs that cool dance (Mira’s “tribute to Bollywood”) at the sangeet (am I spelling this right? Apologies for errors as I don’t know Hindi) are mother and daughter in real life.
The sangeet was shot in four hours in a (drained) swimming pool belonging to a friend of the director. Some film was damaged by X-rays in airport security, and scenes had to be re-shot. The sangeet footage was among the damaged. The director paid big bucks to have it digitally restored/repaired since they could not re-shoot this footage! In the re-shot footage, Mira wanted more rain, so it didn’t look like such a low-budget film that they couldn’t afford to buy rain. :)
And there you have it. A review of a movie that served as a turning point in my life. Mira Nair gets major kudos for bringing the East to the West, making it accessible, introducing Indian culture into the American mainstream, and showing at our core, human beings from all walks of life have more in common than not.
