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Exotic India. Pungent
streets steam after a tropical rainfall drenches. The multitude
teems with disquietude, or pose silently with sacred grace.
Over one billion in population and numerous states and religious
sects daunt the outside observer's comprehension of this incredible
region of Southern Asia. Acclaimed Indian filmmaker Mira Nair's
Monsoon Wedding
is an insight into one particular tradition in the Punjabi
Indian culture, an invitation underpinned with the universal
themes of responsibility versus commitment, hopes versus dreams.
A wedding ceremony in
any country, at any time, is a perilous emotional undertaking.
The reflection the family holds of itself, already flawed,
is further fractured. In Monsoon
Wedding,
the Verma's are a family portrait of jitters and jubilation
against a background of caste and culture clash.
The film luxuriates
in sensory explosions: a Bihari plucks the mango colored petals
of glorious marigolds: he loves me he loves me not; sitars
vibrate in sympathy with woeful young lovers; earrings dangle,
bangles jangle. Aditi, the bride-to-be has eyes seafoam green
and skin the "colour of butter." She and her cousins
are burnished beauties that slink in silk sari—shades
of burnt sienna, pyracantha, magenta, midnight blue. For the
wedding celebration, the bride is bedecked in jewels, her
ensemble embroidered with gold threading. Attired in pale
pink turbans and white native garb are the male members of
the wedding party.
The betrothed couple
is the focal point of the story, but not its true heart. It
is the romance between P.K. Dubey, the "upwardly mobile,
cell phone-wielding wheeler-dealer Tent and Catering"
contractor and Alice, the Verma's housemaid. Alice's purity
and solemnity compels Dubey to discard his pomposity. Their
courtship leads to a true "love marriage."
The heartbreak of Monsoon
Wedding is Aditi's father, Lalit — whom, amidst the
jumble of endless details is anguished to discover a heretofore-trusted
family friend's past pedophile behavior with the orphaned
niece he's raised, Ria. A true dilemma: he must not only confront
the man he reveres, but is financially obligated to as well.
With great dignity, Lalit casts him out: "These are my
children and I will protect them from even myself if I have
to." Lalit must also entreat Ria, who is poised to run
away, to stay: "My family means everything to me. Please
don't leave us. Please. Ria if you go, everything will break."
Ria acquiesces; tears and rain wash away all evil influences.
Glass fragments painstakingly
reworked into a new mirror image, the family rejoices during
the monsoon wedding celebration, bound together once more
by love and honor.
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