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

Pather Panchali

Pather Panchali

1955

Director: Satyajit Ray

Starring: Subir Banerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Karuna Banerjee, Chunibala Devi

For everything the modern American filmgoer thinks they know about Indian cinema, none of it would exist without Pather Panchali and Satyajit Ray.  Although Ray’s work is light years away from the flashy Bollywood spectacles, and much more akin to the Italian neorealist movement, Ray’s work put Indian cinema on the map, and this is the one that started them all.  Is Pather Panchali an easy film, or even an entertaining film?  No, not really, but it occupies a significant place in film history.

The film follows a small, poor Indian family living in the country in the early twentieth century.  The mother (Karuna Banerjee) is constantly worrying about money, as her husband is a priest and playwright who works only sporadically and doesn’t bring many wages home.  She’s also looking after an elderly relative Auntie (Devi) while tending to her two children, daughter Durga (Das Gupta), who is the first born, and young son Apu (Subir Banerjee).  

And that’s about it.  There is no overarching storyline from beginning to end; we merely observe this family living its life throughout the film.  It’s not even episodic; there are not distinct threads we explore and then fulfill.  No, we just watch and observe, become a part of the family’s life for the period of the film.  This works very well to paint an image of the lives we are following, but, to be honest, it makes for a rather difficult and long film to take in.  At two plus hours, it tends to move at a snail’s pace, and it’s a bad sign when, thirty minutes in, I feel like we should be halfway through.  I appreciate greatly Ray’s desire to draw for us these wide swaths of poverty-riddled rural India, and there is absolutely no doubt that this film exposes me to a world I would otherwise not have known.  But it’s a bit of a rough journey along the way, the end result being not exactly the most gripping film.

Now, having said that, there is tremendous beauty in Pather Panchali.  The film is set in the countryside, and Ray goes to town with some gorgeous shots of a small path in the woods, of rain falling on a pond, of fields of wheat, of old buildings nestled amongst trees and streams.  For a filmmaker making his first film (and a director of photography shooting his first film, and several actors acting in their first film), there is an extraordinary sense of confidence in Pather Panchali.  Ray plays with light and shadow in some scenes, we have a tracking shot through the women in the village square, and constantly, there are subdued performances from all the lead actors, and at the end of the film, there is the feeling that this is exactly the movie Ray wanted to make.  

 

Once again, here is a film that uses mostly nonprofessional actors to fill the leads.  The father, played by Kanu Banerjee, had some experience, as did the actress playing Auntie, but all other parts were filled by amateurs.  What I tend to like about nonprofessional film actors, is how they typically underplay their scenes, as this can be very effective.  It’s no different in Pather Panchali.  The emotional range of the story is great, starting with birth and going to death and back again.  The actors, though, leave histrionic fits at the door and instead are simple and open in their delivery.  Ray apparently had little script to work with, so these actors were also improvising based on his notes for the scene.  When it came to the two siblings, Durga and Apu, this approach led to a very natural relationship.  Durga and Apu feel like real siblings, a brother and sister who play together, fight together, and do chores together.

 

Additionally, my favorite aspect of Pather Panchali, and, indeed, most of Ray’s films, is probably its use of music.  As this is not Bollywood, there is little to no singing, and music is mostly for soundtrack purposes.  The music in Pather Panchali is mostly that of long instrumental ragas, songs that are repetitive in nature, but that I also tend to like.  Wikipedia tells me that ragas can be defined as “a tonal framework for composition and improvisation,” and this definition seems fitting.  There is a distinct sense of hypnotism in this sort of music, in its gentle yet insistent percussive repeats, where lack of a distinct melody actually works.  Every time Ray uses soundtrack in Pather Panchali, I feel the movie works better.  It’s a shame, then, that he chooses not to use soundtrack for the majority of the film.  In the quiet of the simple dialogue, I watch the family with a bit of a sense of tedium, but when Ray adds music, it’s magical.  The music provides a further emotional underpinning to Ray’s message, and I love it.  All the pieces are distinct enough to emphasize the particular scene they were chosen for, and there is a wide range of emotional set pieces and therefore, a wide range of musical accompaniment.  But it’s all good stuff.

 

Ultimately, Pather Panchali is a film that deserves your respect, even if you don’t exactly enjoy yourself while watching it.  It’s a bit tedious at times, and more than a little depressing at times, but it’s also full of beauty and warmth.  Pather Panchali was a huge bounding step forward not only for Indian cinema, but international cinema as a whole, as it speaks to the fact that people in every country have a story to tell with which the whole world will identify. 

Arbitrary Rating: 7.5/10

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire
2008
Director: Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan
Starring: Dev Patel, Freida Pinto, Anil Kapoor

The year that Slumdog Millionaire won Best Picture was a scant Oscar year for me. I was deeply entrenched in viewing older films and rarely came up for air by actually going to a current movie theater. The only nominated film for Best Picture that I had seen was Frost/Nixon, which I still think is a good film, if not a little lacking, and I was wincing over the exclusion of The Dark Knight from the nominations list. For some reason, I sort of mentally wrote off a lot of films from that year. For some reason, I was anticipating not enjoying Slumdog Millionaire.

I honestly don’t know why.

Because I enjoyed the heck out of it as I watched it just now.

Jamal Malik (Patel as an adult, Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and Tanay Chheda in flashbacks) is one question away from winning India’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The police, however, are convinced that an uneducated boy from the slums has to be cheating in order to get so far. Jamal walks through every question he was asked on the show, flashing back to episodes in his life that explain how he knew the answer. All this is a pretext, however, for the real story, the grand opera of family, love, and betrayal involving Jamal’s brother Salim (Madhur Mittal, Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, and Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala) and his childhood friend Latika (Pinto, Rubina Ali, and Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar).