Monsoon Wedding. Directed by Mira Nair. Written by Sabrina Dhawan. With Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Vasundhara Das, Parvin Dabas, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Tilotama Shome, Randeep Hooda, Neha Dubey, Ishaan Nair, and Rajat Kapoor. A USA Films release. At the Avon and Flagship cinemas.

A wedding is the essence of screwball comedy, merging as it does otherwise irreconcilable elements into a gladhanding, pratfalling, pompous carnal binge. In a society as diverse and teeming as India's, planning and pulling off such a feat must be a challenge. Making an entertaining movie about it must be an even greater challenge, but Mira Nair meets it in her exuberant and crafty Monsoon Wedding. Like most weddings, this one is stressful and chaotic in its preparation and a little bit false and tacky in its execution, but its pleasures prove genuine and deep.

The shaky nature of the artifice shows up in the opening image, a shot of glowing petals dropping from a floral arch onto the pissed-off visage of father-of-the-bride Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah). It's just another sign that he's getting ripped off by P.K. Dube (Vijay Raaz), the buffoonish, vaguely disreputable wedding planner who first seems like a ferret attached to a cell phone. Not an auspicious omen for the arranged marriage between Lalit's daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and Texas-based engineer Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas), who will meet for the first time days before the nuptials take place.

But that opening image also establishes a key virtue of the film, Declan Quinn's zesty, mostly hand-held cinematography, the party-colored equivalent of the wedding's spicy food, steamy weather, and simmering passions. Together with the music on the soundtrack, which ranges from traditional Indian classics to pop tunes and Bollywood numbers, the swirling visuals make for a sensual delight that's seductive but doesn't quite conceal the darkness under the gaudy surface.

Such as Lalit's crass contempt for his Australian nephew Rahul Chadha (Randeep Hooda), or his more insensitive dismissal of his own teenage son, chubby Varun (Ishaan Nair), who prefers cooking and dance to more "manly" endeavors. Aditi, for her part, sullies the notion of bridal purity by pursuing almost to her wedding night an affair with her married boss, who's a slick hypocrite railing against decadent morals on the TV talk show he hosts.

Most disturbing, though, is rich Uncle Tej (Rajat Kapoor), the preening and creepy family benefactor. He bailed Lalit out back when Lalit fled from Punjab to New Delhi, penniless after the 1947 partition; now he's the wedding's guest of honor. But why does cousin Ria (Shefali Shetty) shrink from this éminence grise even when he offers to pay for her dream of taking part in a writing program in an American university?

These troubles, of course, pale before the horrors visited on the hapless slum children in Nair's first feature, Salaam, Bombay! (1988), and even before the harsh memories and insidious hatreds underlying her Mississippi Masala (1991). Nair lost her edge and some of her common sense in the Hollywood puff piece The Perez Family (1995) and the unfortunate period porn Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996). With Wedding she's regained her balance, mixing the bitter with the sweet, though going a little heavy on the latter, in a film about the power of combining opposites.

Among the opposites brought together here are tradition and progress. Screwball comedy, despite its chaotic antics, is, like the ceremony that crowns this film, a conciliatory approach to such differences. True, the most egregious representative of an oppressive patriarchy gets expelled by the end, in a scene that could have been formulaic scapegoating except for the superbly humanizing performance of Shah. But a film can hardly be considered subversive when two characters agree that, all in all, a marriage pre-arranged between strangers is at least as likely to succeed as one between people who fall in love.

Love, though, has the last word, as nearly every character finds the appropriate mate despite his or her worst inclinations. Most appealing is the transformation of the benighted P.K., who takes time out from frantic phone calls to make eye contact with a maid with the unlikely but apt name of Alice (Tilotama Shome). What he does then with some flowers and candles makes for the most touching and unexpected moment in the film, proving that however you might plan for a wedding, you can never account for the storm at its heart.

Issue Date: April 19 - 25, 2002