by Kara Dietrich
Staff Writer

Going out with a bang, the Friday night showing of Monsoon Wedding, a highly acclaimed Indian romantic comedy, marked the conclusion of The Eye: The 2004 Bates College Festival of Contemporary Asian Cinema. Although the film was scheduled to play last week, its postponement did not stop the handful of people who came to watch Mira Nair’s colorful imagination come to life on the screen in a story about an upper-class arranged marriage in India.

The screening opened with a short discussion by John Yu Zou, assistant professor of Chinese at Bates. He spoke about the film, its female director, and the rising film industry in India, coined “Bollywood.” As an accomplished film director and producer, Zou spoke about Nair’s education at Delhi University and then later at Harvard. Some of her other films include Salaam Bombay!, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language in 1988, and Mississippi Masala, starring Denzel Washington. She has worked both in India and the United States. One of her more recent accomplishments is an 11 minute, 9 second short film about a family in Queens whose son was missing after September 11. However, before that project she set out to New Delhi in the summer of 2000 with a strict 30-day schedule to film Monsoon Wedding, which earned her recognition and a Golden Globe nomination.

At its core, Monsoon Wedding is about love, as would befit a romantic comedy. However, the film is also a family drama with difficult issues and a dark side. It opens as the monsoon rains loom in India and the Verma family gathers in New Delhi for the arranged marriage of Aditi and Hemant. Aditi actually loves her former boss, Vikram, but agrees to marry Hemant and move with him to Houston, Texas after the ceremony. Her apprehension is evident from the onset, but over the course of the festivities leading up to the wedding, she begins to fall for the man she will call her husband.

Although Aditi and Hemant’s marriage and the preparations it entails are the focal point of the film, other stories also emerge. The “wedding planner” falls for the family’s maid, Alice. Ria, Aditi’s unmarried cousin, reveals a dark, suppressed secret of sexual abuse by a family friend. Ayesha, another cousin of the bride, lures a handsome Australian student, Rahul, with her sultry Indian charm.

The film colorfully captured the juxtaposition of Indian tradition with modern culture. A quote from the film’s website captures this balance saying, “it pays affectionate tribute to a city where weighty tradition collides daily with global culture and the dot-com age, yielding an unusual and melodious harmony.”

While the film was captivating, it lacked a driving momentum. I found myself wanting more from the numerous characters and their stories. The language switches, often mid sentence, were frustrating. The subtitles helped, but also distracted from the film’s ambiance. Despite these critiques, Monsoon Wedding is an educational and strikingly real picture of India today. It is a film worth seeing both for its cinematography and its interwoven stories.



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