From the Archives

Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding was a hit as soon as it opened in Harvard Square. Here’s some of what Crimson staff writer Amelia Lester had to say about the film in her March 15, 2002 review:

Monsoon Wedding isn’t a subtle film. It is, instead, melodrama at its glorious and exuberant best: When the screen isn’t drenched with the torrential rain of monsoon season, it is saturated in a kaleidoscopic array of color.

As the preparations for an arranged marriage between two wealthy New Delhi families unfold, we engage in the heady rush towards the cosmopolitanism which India’s burgeoning middle classes have so eagerly embraced. Making little or no attempt to represent income disparities, the film instead celebrates the joys of excess and consumption, perfectly illustrated through the analogy of a wedding.

The film explores five intertwining family relationships which are all bought to a climatic point of self-awareness by the impending nuptials. The relationships seem to have been constructed to demonstrate the ravages of globalization: the groom, for example, has flown in from Houston and is clumsily out of touch with traditional Indian customs; the bride’s cousin begins an affair with a distant Australian relative whose western norms of sexual permissiveness complicate the coupling.

The action is at its most convincing when it appears to be unfolding before our eyes, an effect no doubt helped by Nair’s decision to film almost entirely on Super 16mm—blown up to 35mm—retaining the mesmerizing freneticism of the hand held camera.

To describe Monsoon Wedding as a film about culture clash and the effects of westernization on traditional Indian culture would be selling it short. Certainly, there are elements of cultural tension: Even as the family prepares to celebrate an arranged marriage, they speak in a jumble of Hindi and English (the young men tell everyone to “chill” in English, while grandmothers speak only Hindi) and the girls read Cosmopolitan. While Nair evidently reveres traditional culture through her attention to details during the wedding preparations, she highlights the liberating effects of western culture on the more suffocating elements of daily Indian life.

The most joyful moments come not from pithy political insights, but rather from the unexpected bonds which emerge between family members. In one particularly well-realized scene, Varun, the sybaritic and spoilt 11-year-old son, teaches his nervous and rheumatic father to dance in preparation for the wedding celebrations. He is at first reluctant to learn the requisite moves, but in the film’s final scene, the father is glimpsed amongst the crowd dancing with considerable aplomb.

Monsoon Wedding is full of such scenes and is a true crowd pleaser. For all its larger-than-life excesses, it balances humor and humanity with a deft touch; it is irresistible.