Many who celebrated Christmas recently will have been made aware once more of the fundamental ambivalence of such family get-togethers. Under the joy of reunion can lie tensions that are part of the very fabric of family history, and authors, playwrights and filmmakers have long exploited weddings, funerals and birthday celebrations as a way of examining family relationships. Robert Altman did it in A Wedding in 1978; Thomas Vinterberg did it Dogme-style in Festen (The Celebration) in 1998.
Family sagas examine that unit over a long period of time, but occasions such as weddings and funerals offer the opportunity to look at the family in cross-section, as it were. Which is exactly what Mira Nair does in Monsoon Wedding, a tender but trenchant portrait of an extended Indian family under the pressure of an impending nuptial event.
The Verma clan is gathering in New Delhi for the wedding of Aditi (Vasundhara Das) to Hemant (Parvin Dabas). This is an arranged marriage, though Aditi is a pretty modern miss and still in two minds about her recent affair with a television presenter; her husband-to-be is an engineer from an Indian family now living in Houston, Texas.
Aditi’s father, Lalit (Naseeruddin Shah), is in a state of perpetual anxiety over the practical details of marquees and the like — not to mention how the hell he is going to pay for it all. He has employed contractor PK Dubey (Vijay Raaz) to get the tents and arches of blossoms up on time, but Dubey is a bit of a fast-talking improviser, jabbering into his cellphone and munching on the marigolds that are the wedding’s floral decorations. In a movie of many good performances, Raaz is particularly good: his PK is as endearing as he is annoying, and PK’s own romance, taking place beside or beneath the official one, is deeply touching.
Then there is a range of relatives: Aditi’s unmarried cousin Ria (Shefali Shetty), who harbours secret resentments; another cousin, the handsome Rahul (Randeep Hooda), visiting from Australia where he is studying, develops an amorous interest of his own. Aditi’s younger brother, Varun (Ishaan Nair), is in the process of challenging gender roles via his interest in the traditional wedding dance, while rich family friend Mohan Rai (Roshan Seth) is not simply the distinguished and generous expatriate he seems to be.
And that’s not all — but you get the idea. This is a family in a state of mobility, like modern India, where tradition and modernity clash and mingle. The movie itself is a metaphor of mobility, as its narrative (the script is by Sabrina Dhawan) flows from one character to another, from one storyline to another, and the camera keeps moving over rippling fabrics and labile faces. The writer and the director keep it all together with admirable facility, allowing us to discover each character piece by piece and to place them in relation to each other; they are, after all, as characters, also discovering or rediscovering themselves and their attachments in the web of family relations.
As a director, Nair has moved from the gritty portrait of India’s underclass in Salaam Bombay! (1988) to the glossy mythicisms of Kama Sutra (1996), taking in the issue of love across racial boundaries in Mississippi Masala (1991). Monsoon Wedding progresses from and is enriched by these, providing a snapshot of another level of Indian society, this time a bourgeois family still rooted in local tradition but also connected to a globalised world.
Nair and Dhawan do not, however, make heavy weather of such tensions; the internal dynamics of the family seem more important than a big statement about Indian society as a whole or sweeping pronouncements about the world today. And that is what gives Monsoon Wedding its warm heart: the people in it are its most important element, as people. They are treated with great compassion, even love. For all its flaws, not to mention its dark secrets, the extended Verma clan seems by the end of Monsoon Wedding to be something approaching the ideal family, a collection of people whose company one has enjoyed for an engrossing two hours — a family one almost wants to join.