Monsoon Wedding

Monsoon Wedding DVD

Combining traditional ideas of marriage and family with the realities of modern life MONSOON WEDDING is a lighthearted film from director Mira Nair SALAAM BOMBAY!. The majority of the film takes place inside the home of an extended Punjabi family living in New Delhi who has gathered together for the arranged wedding of Adita Vasundhara Das. She is to marry Hemant Parveen Dabaas a man who works in the United States. This means leaving her family home to go live with him and though Adita says she welcomes the new opportunity it is clear that she already feels homesick. Also at issue is the fact that she is still in love with her former boss Vikram Sameer Arya a television producer who promises to divorce his wife but never does. Though Adita is careful to hide her true feelings from her family her sister Ria Shefali Shetty worries that she is marrying for the wrong reasons. Ria has issues of her own. She wants to go to school in the United States and become a writer but her family would prefer her to follow a more traditional path and they claim that money is the reason. Meanwhile the rebellious wedding planner P.K. Dubey Vijay Raaz is falling in love with the family maid Alice Tilotama Shome. Sparks also fly between two of Adita's cousins Ayesha Neha Dubey and Rahul Randeep Hooda who meet at the wedding and find that their conflicting values are a good challenge for each other. A festive film MONSOON WEDDING is a swirling family comedy.

Monsoon Wedding [VHS]

Monsoon Wedding is a return to form for Mira Nair, director of 1988's Salaam Bombay! Nair's gift for observation of the everyday and her love for her characters make for a delightful film, which spins a web of family relationships that knit and break during a wedding at a perfect pace. The excellent performances exceed the often stereotypical roles on offer (including the incomparable Nasiruddin Shah as the harassed father, Kulbhushan Kharbanda as the comic uncle, and Shefali Chaya as the orphaned cousin). Nair's sympathetic eye for the unnoticed and the harassed is at its best with the tender romance between the servant and Dube (Vijay Raaz), the marigold- munching, upwardly mobile wedding coordinator, who brings pathos and humor to the often unseen servant classes. The handheld camera gives a docudrama feel to this celebratory look at the upper-middle-class Hindu Punjabi joint family, while paying tribute to modern Indian public culture of music, television, and, of course, "Bollywood." --Rachel Dwyer