"A joyous and affirmative tone"
REGUS LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

Monsoon Wedding
Directed by MIRA NAIR
Written by SABRINA DHAWAN

ABOUT THE FILM

Delhi, the present. Lalit Verma and his wife Pimmi, whose own marriage was an arranged one, prepare for the wedding of their eldest daughter Aditi to Hermant, an engineer based in Houston. The occasion will be a traditional one, characterised by an abundance of marigolds (the traditional Indian wedding flower) and as the preparations threaten to become chaotic, members of the extended family arrive from all quarters. But the tradition of the virginal Hindu bride married to a man she has never seen has long since become outmoded among the prosperous liberal middle class of urban India. Aditi is unsure about her marriage, and may be in love elsewhere; Pimmi's brother-in-law Tej hides a menacing secret; young love may be blossoming elsewhere among the party, and cynical wedding contractor Dubey is getting more than he bargained for.

INTERVIEW WITH MIRA NAIR

Director Mira Nair was interviewed about Monsoon Wedding by Simran Bhargava for asiaweek.com (January 19th, 2001, Vol. 27, no2)

"Nair, 43, has never been one for candy-coated confections in the tradition of song-a-minute Hindi movies. The independent director first drew international attention for her gritty feature on street children, Salaam Bombay!, which won the Camera D'Or award at Cannes in 1988. Since then, she has continued to focus on subjects that get under her skin. These have been in the uncertain terrain where race, class and gender intersect. Kamasutra, for instance, was a sumptuous exploration of sexual politics set in the 16th century. Mississippi Masala dealt with inter-racial relationships in America. The controversial projects earned both praise and scorn, Still, Nair's passion for her material moves some investors - both Masala (with Denzel Washington) and her third feature, The Perez Family (with Anjelica Houston) were financed by US studios. Monsoon Wedding, however, marks a return to her roots as a Punjabi and as a 'guerrilla' documentary maker. (She lived with three strippers in their grimy Mumbai flat for four months to get the right feel for one of her earliest documentaries, Indian Cabaret.)

Nair wanted her latest feature shot on video, fast and cheap, and set in the city she had grown up in, Delhi. 'I thought the new technology would allow me to make a quick film, using all my inspirations: the Punjabi, the middle-class,' she says. The idea was to produce a 'completely contemporary Delhi movie' in which marriage celebrations reveal how changing social mores pull against traditional ways. Cracks emerge in a family's happy faced as members fly in from different parts of the world - Silicon Valley in the US, Australia and Dubai. Illicit trysts, betrayals and bitter feuds form interweaving sub-plots behind the marquees, much like a Robert Altman movie.

The project really began when Nair received a windfall. Arte, a French film company, had by her new documentary, a 36-minute gem called The Laughing Club of India, it gave her seed money. Nair, who now teaches film at Columbia University in New York, discussed the idea with Dhawan, her assistant. As they talked, the appeal of making a tribute to their culture grew. While Dhawan holed up in her little New York apartment to write the script, Nair kept her supplied with home-cooked food, and not a few ideas. 'The project was conceived in a spirit of lightness,' says Nair, whose earlier films like Salaam Bombay! and Mississippi Masala have been much heavier in tone. 'The idea was to shoot the movie in 30 days, without spending millions, include family and friends in the project and generally have a lot of fun doing it.

' Nuptial celebrations, however, have a way of ballooning. Monsoon Wedding grew into a seriously big little film. By the time shooting began, more than 60 actors and crew members were assembled on location at a posh farmhouse outside Delhi. The team included Indian stars Naseeruddin Shah and Roshan Seth and cinematographer Declan Quinn, who shot Leaving Las Vegas. Still, a lot of the props and extras - Nair's nieces and nephews as well as her grandmother's jewellery, for instance - came cheap. The director's technological ambitions, however, took unexpected turns. She began her project using digital video, thinking that would allow her to distribute the film over the Internet using streaming techniques. But the crew found that the medium just couldn't capture the sumptuous colours of Indian wedding ceremonies, which often take place at night. Instead, the crew shot Monsoon on Super 16 stock using additional funds raised from a division of U.S. cable company The Independent Film Channel. Even so, Nair and her team have managed to invest the movie with the immediacy of digital productions by using a hand-held camera. The lens follows the action rather than the other way around, allowing the director to capture the unexpected - and convey a sense of being in the centre of the unfolding drama. Says Nair, 'To me, the greatest compliment would be if a friend were to come up and tell me - Hey, this is exactly like my wedding.'"

DIRECTORS INFORMATION

Mira Nair was born in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, the daughter of a civil servant She studied at the University of New Delhi and was active as an actress in repertory theatre in India before going to Harvard in 1976, where she graduated in Sociology (1979). She started making films in the USA for R.Leacock and D.A. Pennebaker, and directed several award-winning documentaries before making her feature debut Salaam Bombay! The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988 and, in addition to 25 international awards, received the Camera D'Or (for best first feature) and the Prix du Publique (for most popular entry) at the Cannes Film Festival. Mira Nair's subsequent films include Mississippi Masala (1991), The Perez Family (1995) and Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love (1996). She also directed My Own Country, about a young immigrant doctor dealing with the AIDS epidemic in the Deep South, for Showtime in 1998. In addition to Monsoon Wedding, Nair has recently completed the documentary The Laughing Club of India. Her current film is Hysterical Blindness, a feature starring Uma Thurman, Gena Rowlands and Juliette Lewis.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

"An exuberant family drama set in Mira Nair's beloved Punjabi culture, where ancient tradition and dot-com modernity combine in unique and perfect harmony.
As the romantic monsoon rains loom, the extended Verma family reunites from around the globe for a last-minute arranged marriage in New Delhi. Monsoon Wedding traces five intersecting stories, each navigating different aspects of love s they cross boundaries of class, continent and morality. The film celebrates a contemporary India never before seen on screen."
www.filmfourextra

"This theme of established ritual stretching and cracking under the strain of shifting social mores links Nair's film with Robert Altman's A Wedding (1978), which likewise showed an elaborate formal ceremony threatening to come apart at the seams. But Nair shares nothing of Altman's general misanthropy, taking an altogether more benevolent view of her characters. Confused and self-deluding though they often are, none of them apart from the suavely predatory Tej is essentially malicious, and once his disruptive influence has been banished everything can be resolved in an explosion of communal dance and rejoicing. If this finale, for all its energy and exuberance, doesn't quite convince, it's less through any failure on the part of Nair and Dhawan than because, throughout most of the film, they've tellingly undercut the comedy with a sense of a society in uneasy transition."
Phillip Kemp, SIGHT AND SOUND

"To the world, Mira Nair is the second most famous film director (after Satyajit Ray) that India has ever produced. But in her own country, opinions about her divide sharply. Middle-class liberals may applaud her films for holding up a mirror to Indian society, but her detractors complain that they show India to the world in an unflattering light.
…Shot in semi-documentary style with hand-held cameras and with a script in English and Hindi, Monsoon Wedding is far removed from Bollywood movies. On one level it is a cheerful, heart-warming comedy about the Vermas, an affluent, middle-class New Delhi family preparing for their daughter's arranged marriage to a young Indian man who lives in Texas. But Nair being Nair, she cannot resist making it more: a portrait of modern India, with all the contradictions that involves."
David Gritten, www.telegraph.co.uk

CAST LIST

Notes Compiled by:
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