Monsoon Wedding
India is no slouch when it comes to movies, weddings, or, for that matter, monsoons. So it's no surprise that Mira Nair's ''Monsoon Wedding'' should be teeming with ever-escalating rewards. The Harvard-educated Nair has for years been making noises about having some fun with the Bollywood movies of her native India, and in ''Monsoon Wedding'' she does.
Certain to be Nair's most internationally crowd-pleasing film yet, it's also an up-to-the-minute dispatch from her native Delhi, full of life. It revels in throwing far-flung members of two Indian families together for the wedding of the modern daughter of a perpetually overextended businessman to an Indian engineer whose family lives in Australia, but who lives in Houston.
''Monsoon Wedding'' is effortlessly contemporary, matter-of-factly portraying a variety of single women, yet freely borrowing most of its conventions from India's formulaic Bollywood romances and comedies. The nature of the mix is announced early on, when the conflicted bride (doe-eyed Indian pop star Vasundhara Das) drops in on her lover, the Westernized host of a hit TV talk show, Delhi-dot-com. She's ready to leave him, aware that he'll never marry her. And she wants to get married. But she's bothered about deceiving her intended husband (Parvin Dabas) about her virginity. She's hardly the only family member who's troubled, and a few festering situations come to a head and pop like firecrackers as the hustle and bustle builds.
Nair certainly knows her way around the form, and the bright, brisk, warm-hearted comedy of manners piles on the complications as the bride's father frets, her unmarried cousin airs some dirty family laundry, and the clan's patriarch is confronted.
The most gossamer of the film's several love stories is played out under a canopy of marigolds amid a driving rain by the film's comic relief, a caterer played by Vijay Raaz, who falls for a sensitive young kitchen maid (Tilotama Shome). Meanwhile, the collision of incense and cell phones continues as Indians from different backgrounds and different places mix to a counterpoint of fraying nerves and lively music in the most rollicking, kitschy Bollywood tradition. What's impressive is Nair's way of marrying tradition and modernity. Essentially, she unites them in a rush of Punjabi high spirits and family ties. Declan Quinn's fluid camerawork rides Nair's off-the-cuff way of capturing the various strands of the story, which are played out in a mix of characters and family crises.
As anyone who saw her ''Kama Sutra'' will know, no filmmaker is more alive to film's potential for sensuality. This valentine to Punjabi culture, shot in 30 days on a tight schedule, never succumbs to briskness in ways that preclude Nair from singing a visual song to the Delhi she obviously loves. ''Monsoon Wedding'' is filled with the kind of full-blooded acting it needs. There are also nicely crafted subtleties in Naseeruddin Shah's tense yet optimistic patriarch, Rajat Kapoor's predatory benefactor, and Shefali Shetty's troubled, unmarried cousin.
The film's bountiful warmth and gusto do their work. By the end, we feel part of the family, too, which, knowing Nair, is exactly what she had in mind. Her nephew ably plays the bride's teenage brother. Each day the cast and crew ate home cooking from the kitchen of Nair's own mother. ''Monsoon Wedding'' is cinematic home cooking at its most savory.
Jay Carr can be reached by e-mail at jcarr@globe.com.
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