Monsoon Wedding (2001)

Only a few minutes of Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair's surprising 2001 crossover hit, was all it took for me to be quickly overwhelmed. The film centering on the lead up to a big Punjabi Hindu wedding spares no expense in trying to get us acclimated with as many of its characters as it can. As if we're being taken by the shoulder by an overly friendly uncle and introduced personally to each member of the family. Although, hopefully it's not uncle Tej who's got his arm wrapped around us. There's about five different storylines happening, all focused on different types of love spanning all generations. On top of that, Monsoon Wedding is a stealth musical with just about every scene featuring prominent diegetic or non-diegetic music. But in all of its madness the film never feels overly stuffed or plodding, nor did I find myself falling to the wayside when it came to caring about the characters.

The fact that we know everyone is going to come together for the wedding caused me to consider what relation a character had to the rest, thus investing me more in each scene. It also doesn't hurt that Monsoon Wedding isn't afraid to be somewhat irreverent to its familial culture. Knowing I can also find humor in its sensory barrage made it a lot more comfortable to go along with the stories; and the fact that the film waits for us to get acclimated before it begins to tackle darker issues within the family was also a smart decision. My favorite storyline was easily the lovesick relationship between wedding planner P.K. Dubey and housemaid Alice. Nair chooses to film their scenes with slow, swooning camera motions. Colors pop and fill the screen; tasteful oranges, bejeweled greens, and thick reds. And the use of Mychael Danna's dreamy score, as well as some soundtracked cuts, add to the slow descent into romance that these two characters are experiencing.

On the topic of cinematography, this film is shot in a decidedly point-and-shoot style with most shots being handheld and close up to our characters. This really proved to me that Nair and writer Sabrina Dhawan were coming from a personal place when making this film. They really want to portray what their experiences with their culture are like, both the good and the bad. And that's also what I like about Monsoon Wedding, it doesn't feel like a film that needs to address its foreign viewers. Even with how the dialogue is written, Dhawan having her characters naturally switch between Hindi, English, and Punjabi; it feels authentic and not like sacrifices were made for legibility. Granted it does make the watch harder, especially since I wasn't able to find English subtitles for what English there was in the film. But the acting and Nair's directing give us enough of a clue as to what's going on.

Monsoon Wedding is a unique film, even amongst its contemporaries I suspect. And it's one that especially sparks my curiosity about Indian cinema, music, and culture. It's a genuine curiosity too, this isn't a tourism film; there's complexities to the family and even the country at large where we get to see glimpses of disparities between middle, lower, and upper class people. It keeps asking, "How do you think these people feel? How do they deal with what they are given?" And it's not only great at that in writing, but everything else.