accessAtlanta

Grade: B+

Verdict: R.S.V.P. to this "Wedding."

Details: Starring Naseeruddin Shay and Vijay Raaz. Directed by Mira Nair. Rated R for language and adult themes. 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: In "Monsoon Wedding," Indian director Mira Nair is doing Robert Altman. The picture is a flavorful look at an extended family clan as relatives gather from as far away as Dubai and Australia to participate in a lavish Punjabi wedding in New Delhi. Everyone's introduced so quickly that, at first, you feel as if you're in one of those Altman character panoramas ("Nashville," "A Wedding," "Gosford Park") where it's almost impossible to tell the players without a scorecard.

A few stand out immediately. There's Lalit (Naseeruddin Shay), the bride's doting father, who's every bit as harried as Spencer Tracy or Steve Martin in the "Father of The Bride" movies. Lalit worries about everything — from the marigolds dropping off the wedding arch to how he's going to pay for all this to why his youngest son prefers cooking shows to cricket.

One of Lalit's biggest stress points is P.K. Dube (Vijay Raaz), a lanky wedding planner who compulsively eats the marigolds as they fall. Glued to his cell-phone and insisting that he always does things "exactly and approximately," he's like an Indian Jeff Goldblum, irritatingly pretentious and lovably vulnerable.

Then, of course, there's the bride and groom, who provide a perfect microcosm for the movie's culture clash between Indian tradition and Western modernization. Hemant (Parvin Dabas) is a computer engineer in Houston who knows more about software as papadam. Yet he's still agreeable to an arranged marriage if that's what his parents wish. Aditi (Vasundhara Das) has also agreed to an arranged marrige, though her reasons are little more complicated. She hopes that it will help resolve the affair she's having with her married boss at the TV station where she works.

Nair juggles at least half-dozen other characters and plot strands. There's a cousin, Ria (Shefali Shetty), who has an ugly skeleton in her closet. This subplot is a little too Oprah to fit in with the rest of the film. Far more affecting is a romance that blossoms between Dube and the family's shy maid, Rahul (Randeep Hooda). It begins as a ludicrous flirtation, but by the time he hands her a heart fashioned out of — yes — marigolds, we're as smitten as they are.

Nair combines the hand-held immediacy of an American independent film with the colorful conventions of a mass-appeal Bollywood movie. Characters spontaneously burst into song and dance — as custom, as celebration, as almost anything.

Yet the tensions between East and West remain the movie's focus. We see it in the way people switch from English to Hindi and back again in the same sentence. Or in the contrast between Aditi's career-woman garb and her stunning traditional wedding gown with its veils and jewels. Or in seeing a Houston engineer arrive for his nuptials on a prancing white horse.

Nair's first picture, "Salaam Bombay!," was an Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film in 1988. Her second, "Mississippi Masala," was a cross-cultural romance starring Denzel Washington. Both are fine films, but she seems more engaged here. The exhilaration and complications of a rite of passage like a wedding have captivated her as an artist and as a woman. She enjoys showing us the flirting, the family strains, the emotional undercurrents that come with the territory.

"Monsoon Wedding" could use some trimming — maybe less of the Bollywood stuff — and it takes longer than it should to find its footing. But the movie gains more resonance as it goes along, drawing us in just as large family reunions do. By the time the groom has arrived in a drenching downpour, you're so much a part of this celebration that you almost expect to catch the bride's bouquet — if they do that in New Delhi.

— Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution