Monsoon Wedding

Monsoon Wedding

2001

Director: Mira Nair

Starring: Naseeruddin Shah, Vasundhara Das, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz

There was a time in my life, for quite a few years, actually, when my cinematic diet consisted entirely of the same fare that is Monsoon Wedding.  In the past ten years or so, I’ve stretched myself, imbibing film after film that is far beyond genres I usually watch, learning to love movies outside my comfort zone.  It’s been a wonderful experience, and one that I wouldn’t change, but every now and then, it feels incredibly comforting to settle down with a frothy little romantic dramedy.  Seeing Monsoon Wedding for the first time took me back, man.

Aditi (Das) is getting married.  Her father (Shah) is stressed, the wedding planner (Raaz) is an incompetent goofball, and her cousin Ria (Shetty) seems to be depressed.  Aditi herself isn’t terribly jazzed about the arranged marriage to an Indian man from Houston, Texas she’s never met, especially as she’s still in love with her married ex-boyfriend.  As the scores of relatives descend upon the family house for the days of wedding ceremonies, romance blossoms in unlikely places just as old family secrets are revealed.  Nothing like a wedding to bring out the best – and worst – in people.

  

Undoubtedly, the central theme of Monsoon Wedding is the universality of the Crazy Family.  This is a film cut from the same cloth as My Big Fat Greek Wedding, with a cast of cacophonous characters doing their best to confuse you with their identities and separate plights.  There are several storylines continually being developed by the rather large cast, but in the end, it doesn’t matter, because it’s really just about this family muddling through.  Wait, there’s one scene where the father mentions money problems but it doesn’t really go anywhere?  No worries.  The story of the younger brother being sent off to boarding school feels markedly unresolved?  Don’t trouble yourself.  Just as in real life, not every tangent can find a conclusion in the time span of a long weekend.  Monsoon Wedding is about family, plain and simple, and how everyone in the family carries their own cross to bear, but ultimately love, be it romantic or familial, finds a way to triumph. 

Multiple plotlines and large casts can feel confusing, and when you add in the fact that Hindi, Punjabi, and English are all spoken in Monsoon Wedding, sometimes even in the same five minute period, the film constantly feels as though it’s teetering on a knife’s edge.  Credit where credit is due, then, to director Mira Nair, who manages to keep all the balls in the air and continually moves the film forward by focusing on Aditi’s wedding ceremony.  I’ll admit I was a bit overwhelmed during the first half hour of the film, but when I realized that this is a classic example of ensemble casting – and when I turned on the English subtitles for the English lines – everything started to fall into place.  I might not have every character’s name down pat, but by the end, I knew who was interested in whom and how the conclusion benefited which person and why.  Everything comes out in the wash.

  

The romance in Monsoon Wedding was rather lovely.  Although overshadowed by the focus on Aditi’s wedding and her angst about an arranged marriage and her ex, my favorite of the multiple romantic plotlines was easily that of inept wedding planner Dubey and household maid Alice.  Aditi’s family is most definitely upper middle class, if not upper class, and this was the one part of the story that dared delve into class distinctions in India.  Dubey is shown to live in a tiny apartment with a nagging mother, and Alice is the maid.  Watch her face when she first accidentally bumps into Dubey and he says “Forgive me.”  You can read her shock that she wasn’t blamed for the accident, that it wasn’t assumed it was her fault.  Right from that very first moment, I knew how this romance would blossom, but I didn’t care that it was already spelled out.  I wanted to watch these two, whose lives were definitely a bit harder and rougher than Aditi’s family, find their little bit of happiness.  The fact that Aditi’s family includes them in their own wedding ceremony at the end of the movie is heartwarming.

Like every decent romantic dramedy out there, there is more than a whiff of the fairy tale in Monsoon Wedding.  Things wrap up a little too nicely, especially in Aditi’s plot line, to be believable.  At all.  Not every plot line is based on romance, but even in the more serious story line, things seem to resolve a little too nicely.  But you know what?  I’m okay with that.  I wasn’t expecting hard-hitting realism in a story about an Indian upper class wedding.  It’s nice, every now and then, to bid adieu to any semblance of real life and live in a world where everyone gets their happy ending.  Like I said, I used to subsist on a cinematic diet of nothing but films like this.  I welcome the fairy tale, the fantasy, the happy ending.  

  

And yet what really makes Monsoon Wedding work is that it is a fairy tale masquerading as a real life story.  There is a great blend of the two, and although the story tiptoes near the borders of Bollywood excess, it never pushes over the edge.  Sweet without being sickening and with just enough emotional poignancy to make it feel substantial, Monsoon Wedding achieves its goal.  It’s diverting, escapist, well-made fun. 

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi)

Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi)

2001

Director: Hayao Miyazaki

Starring (in English language version): Daveigh Chase, Suzanne Pleshette, Jason Marsden

I don’t really care for “children’s movies.”  I think I overdosed on them too much when I was growing up; I remember coming home from college and my parents taking the family out to see the latest Pixar movie in theaters when I would much rather have seen, well, anything else.  Too many viewings of Monsters Inc (no offense, Pixar) have kept me from seeking out other animated or children’s fare, so most of the recent children’s films in 1001 Movies I have yet to see.  Spirited Away is a very nice, lovely children’s movie, but it hasn’t exactly changed my mind.

Ten year old Chihiro (Chase) is being carted off to live in the suburbs against her will by her parents.  On their way to the new house, her family stops at what appears to be an abandoned theme park.  Her parents are excited, but Chihiro is wary.  After eating some mysterious food, her parents turn into pigs and Chihiro realizes something is dreadfully wrong.  She has entered into the spirit world, and the place is actually a bath house for wealthy spirits run by the menacing Yubaba (Pleshette).  With the help of Haku (Marsden), a young man who is also a trapped dragon spirit, Chihiro must navigate this new world and learn to play by its rules in order to free her parents and get back to where she belongs.

  

The story of Spirited Away is reminiscent of a fairy tale, and I highly doubt I’m the first to make such an association.  The concept of an ordinary human being journeying through an alternate realm full of magic brings Alice in Wonderland to mind first and foremost, but other standard tales just as well.  I was reminded of Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” in terms of the idea of a human character forced to go through the trials and tribulations of a magic world she doesn’t understand in order to save her family.  Yubaba’s name obviously conjures up images of Baba Yaga from Eastern European folklore, and although the name might be a mere coincidence, the character herself only strengthens such an association.  Yubaba’s face is always precisely what I pictured Baba Yaga to look like (although my Baba Yaga never wore a blue Victorian gown).  Yubaba transforms into a bird, and Baba Yaga lived in a hut on top of a chicken’s leg, and Baba Yaga herself is an ambiguous character.  Although Yubaba is certainly the closest Spirited Away has to a villain, she is not wholly evil, and her twin sister Zeniba is downright kind and maternal, another possible reading of Baba Yaga.  Finding these European fairy tale tropes together in a Japanese film is surprising, certainly, but for me, it helped to cement the world of magic and mysticism.  What’s more, I appreciate that there is always a sense of danger in the magic of Spirited Away, just like there is in so many of the original European folk stories.  This is not Disney’s prettified world, there is still damp and ugly and danger.  This, to me, is what fairy tales are all about.

  

But where Spirited Away diverges most significantly from its fairy tale aura is in its presentation of good and evil.  The only other Miyazaki film I’ve seen prior to this is Princess Mononoke, and both these films treat good and evil similarly.  Miyazaki is a surprisingly even-minded storyteller when it comes to this, as I have yet to see a character in these two films that is completely bad.  Rather, there exists a spectrum, and the characters are fluid in their placement along it.  For example, Yubaba, as mentioned above, is the closest thing Spirited Away has to a villain, and yet at one point, she ecstatically hugs Chihiro.  Motivated less by power and more superficial greed, she bends and compromises when she has to, a trait incredibly uncommon to typical villains.  By the end of the story, she feels not so much evil as merely shallow.  Then consider Haku, Chihiro’s friend and guide.  Although I implicitly trusted him when he first shepherds Chihiro through the world, we are almost immediately met with disparate opinions about Haku.  We are told he is a thief, a henchman, and untrustworthy.  I began to doubt whether I could trust him after all.  No-Face, Lin, Kamaji, and the giant baby are all other characters that are difficult to read.  Whose side are they on?  Are they helpful or harmful?  And the thing is, they’re all a bit of both.  Maybe there isn’t such a thing as ‘all right’ or ‘all wrong,’ and to see this ambiguity presented in a children’s animated fairy tale is impressive.  In fact, the only character who can be considered truly “good” in the typical sense is Chihiro, and we must remember she’s rather sulky at the beginning.  I appreciate this take on morality, and as I said, it coincides completely with what I remember of Princess Mononoke.  The characters in Miyazaki’s films feel richer because of this refusal to simply “pick sides.”

  

Here is where I should probably mention the animation.  Of course it’s amazing, it’s Studio Ghibli.  My favorite component of the animation is the background design.  It’s breathtaking as the world of the spirits is slowly built; as Chihiro and her family explore the abandoned theme park, we see more and more buildings, and then the great bath house appears.  This world, the rooms, the sets, so to speak, are gloriously detailed and full of rich, vibrant color.  Yes, the characters are all incredibly imaginative – No-Face was probably my favorite design – but I really love the backgrounds.  Beautiful.

  

Spirited Away is a lovely, magical tale that clearly coincides with a coming of age story for its central character.  Chihiro must find her strength and adaptability in order to survive this strange new world with its ever-shifting characters.  It’s really quite nice, but I’m not a huge fan of children’s movies in that I would rarely, if ever, choose to watch a film that self-identifies in this way.  Although I don’t think I’d ever watch this again, I enjoyed my time with Spirited Away.

Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Amélie

 

Amélie

2001

Director: Jean-Paul Jeunet

Starring: Audrey Tatou, Mathieu Kassovitz

Every now and then, a foreign language film comes around that manages to break down language barriers and win the love of the rather xenophobic American public at large.  Amélie is one such film, a movie entertaining enough to get the average American viewer to forget that they have to “read” the movie.  Thank goodness movies like Amélie exist; we need more infusions of a larger cultural awareness, even if that cultural awareness is a Paris fairy tale.

Amélie (Tatou, in her star-making turn) is a shy loner.  She grew up as an only child and now lives alone in Montmartre working as a waitress at a cheerful bar.  When she finds a rusty tin box hidden in her apartment, full of trinkets and toys from the 1950s, she becomes obsessed with finding the original owner to return to him his treasure trove.  The success of this prompts her to continue work as a do-gooder, but for Amélie, it isn’t just about helping others, she has to make a convoluted maze of it as well.  When she meets fellow oddball loner Nino (Kassovitz) and falls in love, she must face her inner fear and slowly open herself up to allowing others in her life.

Kandahar

Kandahar
2001
Director: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Starring: Nelofer Pazira, Hassan Tantai

A woman (Pazira), Nafas, travels from Iran to Afghanistan in order to rescue her sister. Her sister has written to tell her that she plans to commit suicide at the final eclipse of the century, so Nafas must hurry to Kandahar. Along the way she is escorted by local families and children, landmine victims, expatriates, and more.

Kandahar is, if nothing else, a peek behind the deeply veiled wall of an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban. As Westerners, this is not a world we are exposed to often, not even on Dateline. This is a story of that world told through an inhabitant - of sorts. Nafas and her family were raised in Afghanistan but fled to Canada, accidentally leaving behind the suicidal sister who drives the plot. Nafas is a journalist and certainly sides more with Western values and viewpoints, but has respect enough for the staunchly conservative traditions of the area to obey them without fuss.