Mira Nair’s modern monsoonal fable Monsoon Wedding is as relevant and throbbing with life as it was when released. Nair’s sixth feature film is the ultimate Bollywood dream: a real, warm, thoughtful, sensitive, moving and shocking look at a wedding in a Punjabi Delhi family done in loud flamboyant shades which are never—repeat, NEVER—colour co-ordinated.
On one level, we can look at Monsoon Wedding as the perfect ‘Bollywood’ entertainer with a digestible brand of glamour encircling the enchanting ensemble of fully believable characters who seem not to speak to cinematographer Declan Quinn’s absolutely unobtrusive camera, but amongst themselves. On another level, layer after layer of heartbreaking love and lyrical redemption flows out of the narrative in a wellspring of inspired creativity.
As the harassed, bravely upbeat parents Lalit and Pammi Verma(Naseeruddin Shah and Lilette Dubey) prepare for their daughter Aditi(Vasundhara Das)’s wedding, the guests converge with clamorous conviction into Sabrina Dhawan’s effortless and easy-flowing screenplay. The various subplots within the festive format emerge like chrysalis to conquer spaces in Nair’s emotional universe.
Nair’s film deserves the highest praise possible for being an articulate and intelligent entertainer that makes audiences laugh and cry without resorting to the banshee cues. Audiences’ emotions rise and well unconditionally as the characters present themselves to us in no predictable or pre-defined order or code.
The swirl of captivating energy that defines the characters is also a measure of the director’s unstoppered creative brio. As we fall into the narrative’s raw syncopated rhythms, we instinctively begin to look for those great defining moments in the plot that deliver Monsoon Wedding to the doors of greatness. The performers take it beyond that door.
Perhaps calling the people who inhabit Mira’s mellow monsoonal milieu ‘performers’ is an anomaly akin to describing Shakespearean soliloquies as rabblerousing rhetoric. Every character is as real to us as the people we meet, or the people that we know meet—the film’s reality checkpost stretches no further than that.
We can go on and on extolling the virtues of the lyrical realism that Mira Nair invests in her ‘love song for Delhi’. The Bhangra music and the thumris that carpet the soundtrack elevate the collage of obtainable emotions to a poetic plane. In its use of colour and music, Monsoon Wedding goes much further than Mira Nair’s pathbreaking Salaam Bombay. And yet those components that furnish the film with glamour are also the narrative’s life-support system. For what would an upper-middle-class Punjabi wedding be without its colours, music, and domestic politics?!
Naseeruddin Shah, as the bride’s hassled, frazzled, and dazzled father, brings an unstrained emotional punch into his routine role. This is his best performance in recent times.
A special word for Shefali Shah as Lalit Verma’s orphaned niece, who hides a dark and unspeakable truth in her heart, which comes bubbling to the surface during the marriage festivities. Shefali’s face is a map of the human heart. When Lalit takes a stand against the uncle who abused her when she was a child, Shefali’s face is a portrait of familial tranquility. When she finally dances at the wedding with the rest of the cast, our heart dances for her.