Word: monsoonal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unfold, we engage in the heady rush towards the cosmopolitanism which India’s burgeoning middle classes have so eagerly embraced. Mira Nair ’79 of Salaam Bombay and Mississipi Masala fame has often been criticized for selling Indian poverty in documentary form to the West. Monsoon Wedding represents a stark departure from these previous features. Making little or no attempt to represent income disparities, it instead celebrates the joys of excess and consumption, perfectly illustrated through the analogy of a wedding...
...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. Characters are often familiar stock players of the wedding film genre and the film’s frenetic energy levels are maintained by a joyfully upbeat score that intrudes upon even the most intimate and contemplative of scenes...
...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 the boys watch MTV. In any case, Nair’s message on globalization is unclear, for while she evidently reveres traditional culture through her attention...
...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 outlandishly irresistible...
...recognize the form, the fact is that, whether an Indian movie is a love story or a period epic or a four-hour saga about cricket, at some point people will sing and dance in dazzling, delirious production numbers. And as often as not - perhaps because India is monsoon country - they?re singing in the rain...